Dean Johnson Speaks to Legislators, LA Times, KQED About 1930s 'Repatriation' of Mexican Americans

Dean Kevin R. Johnson spoke to the Los Angeles Times, KQED and Sacramento’s KCRA news about California Senate Bill 537, which seeks a statue or other commemoration of the forced deportations of Mexican citizens and Mexican Americans by federal, state and local authorities in the 1930s under what was collectively known as the “Mexican Repatriation.”

On Aug. 14, Johnson, an expert on immigration law and policy, testified about SB 537 before the California Assembly Committee on Governmental Relations. The committee voted unanimously in favor of the bill authored by Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park).

Speaking with KQED, Johnson called the removal of more than 1 million people in the 1930s “a lawless deportation.” Author of a 2005 Pace Law Review article on the Mexican Repatriation, Johnson noted that “there were no removal procedures. There’s no process, there’s no nothing. And [under law] you can’t deport a citizen.”

The term "repatriation" mischaracterized the actions, Johnson said, since hundreds of thousands of Americans who had never lived in Mexico were deported. They included Johnson’s friend and colleague Cruz Reynoso, the late California Supreme Court justice and UC Davis Law professor.

“I view the repatriation as an ethnic cleansing,” Johnson told KQED. 

Johnson told the Times that erecting a statue formally acknowledging the devastating effects of the deportations could serve as an act of restorative justice. A commemoration “could help educate the community about what happened.”

Kevin R. Johnson is the law school’s dean, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and professor of Chicana/o studies at UC Davis. He is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of immigration law and policy, refugee law, and civil rights.