Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

One of the promises President Trump made during his campaign, in often harsh tones, was that he'd cracked down on illegal immigration from Mexico.

Today, I want to talk about another president who targeted Mexican immigrants decades earlier,

Herbert Hoover.

That shameful time in history was buried and forgotten.

That is, until a relatively unknown politician named Joseph Dunn, then a state senator from

California, began researching

the events more than 15 years ago. Dunn was horrified by what he found. It all started

in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, when Hoover launched a program that resulted in the

illegal deportation of nearly

two million people. Of those people, Dunn found that around 60% were U.S. citizens.

The so-called repatriation program included passing local laws for bidding government employment to anyone of Mexican descent, even legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens.

President Hoover's slogan for the program was American jobs for real Americans.

Dunn says that was code for getting rid of people of Mexican descent,

who weren't considered true Americans.

The Hoover administration began reimbursing localities for enacting his program,

and major companies, including Ford, U.S. Steel, and the Southern Pacific Railroad colluded with the

government by laying off thousands of workers.

According to Francisco Balderrama, the co-author of a book about the program, Mexicans

were scapegoated for the Great Depression. Officials claimed that deportation of

Mexicans and Mexican Americans would create more jobs. They also said this group was overwhelming

welfare offices and charities. But that claim was totally false, as Mexicans made up less than 10% of relief recipients nationwide.

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