Mexican Repatriation

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. had “repatriation programs”, which forced Mexican-Americans to relocate to Mexico. Scapegoated for taking jobs away from “real” Americans during the Great Depression, state and local governments illegally rounded up as many as two million legal immigrants, and others of Mexican heritage onto cattle cars and shipped them back to Mexico, where nearly all of them hadn't lived for decades or had never lived at all. In the process of moving around that many people in harsh conditions, it is inevitable that people will die, and over 10,000 did.