During the 1930s, it is estimated that upwards of 600,000 American citizens who happened to be of Mexican descent were deported from the United States under a cultural repatriation campaign conceived by President Hoover.

Is President Trump destined to repeat one of the most horrendous acts of US policy?

On April 13, following a sit-down meeting at the White House with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, President Trump pontificated about his ideal plan in which U.S. citizens could be deported from the country.

He said, “We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters…I’d like to include them.”

Yes, criminals who actually commit horrendous crimes deserve to be prosecuted and, if found guilty, serve the punishment that the court orders.

But deport them?

To where?

These are U.S. citizens, regardless of whether they are citizens from birth or through naturalization – it shouldn’t matter, a citizen is a citizen with the full rights bestowed upon one, even if they commit a crime.

Just exactly how will President Trump determine which country they get sent to?

Does part of his path to ‘greatness’ include cutting deals with impoverished countries to take unwanted U.S. citizens?

This is not the first time this Administration has floated such an idea.

Karoline Levitt, White House press secretary, just last week confirmed that President Trump was indeed interested in ways to get rid of criminals – who are U.S. citizens, to El Salvador, “if there is a legal pathway to do that.”

Apparently, Attorney General Pam Bondi is already on the case; Trump confirmed on Monday that she was “studying the law.”

What makes these off-hand remarks even more concerning is that last week, as touted in the White House’s “Week 12’s Winners: The American People” article, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service reached an agreement to provide immigration officials with data to locate and deport illegal immigrants.

It’s unclear whether the new ‘agreement’ requires that a court order be in place.

Furthermore, what exactly will stop them from sharing data on U.S. Citizens under investigation for suspected crimes?

The Internal Revenue Service’s IRC Section 6103(i)(1)provides that, pursuant to court order, return information may be shared with law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute non-tax criminal laws.

All this harkens back again to the 1930s (Trump tariff announcement echoes 1930s US trade policy) – President Trump seems destined to repeat many of the ill-conceived policies of President Hoover.

Started under the presidency of Hoover, the Mexican repatriation campaign lasted from 1929 to 1935. Focused primarily on those of Mexican descent, the removals were accomplished through both deportation and ‘voluntary’ departure (though the scare tactics and public pressure hardly left room for voluntary actions).

Records and reports from the time are sketchy at best. For that reason, the majority of researchers seeking “INS repatriation records” from the Great Depression will not find them.

According to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services website, they claim that the repatriation campaigns formally removed approximately 82,000 Mexicans.

However, the actual numbers appear to be much, much higher.

In one of the most expansive studies on the topic, authors Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez detail in their book Decade of Betrayal that the number was north of 1 million people of Mexican descent, of which approximately 60 percent (600,000) were actual U.S. citizens.

We will never know the actual number – that is lost to history and poor record keeping.

However, we do know that citizens of the United States have every legal right to remain in the United States – forever.

One can only hope that common sense will prevail this time around, as it failed to do in the 1930s, so that we do not see mass deportations of those who legally belong in America.