Mass expulsion, babies born behind barbed wire, intrusive medical exams for newcomers, families torn apart: these aren’t scenes from Donald Trump’s promised second-term immigration crackdown, but from the US’s extensive history of xenophobic immigration policy.
While so many Americans watched in horror at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s military-like raids across Los Angeles this summer, US cruelty and violence towards immigrants is nothing new, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants – or those perceived to be immigrants – survivors of previous eras of xenophobia say it’s more important than ever to remember the past. The harms done to them and their families have lasted generations, and what’s happening now threatens to do the same.
The Guardian spoke with four Californians who have lived through, or whose parents lived through, some of these dark moments in US history. They shared how these episodes shaped their lives, what it’s like to see these chapters of history repeat themselves today – and what gives them hope.
Christine Valenciana
When Christine Valenciana, 75, watched footage of armed, masked Ice agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across southern California this summer, rounding up gardeners, car wash workers, veterans and US citizens, it recalled a familiar time in her own family’s history.
In the 1930s, under the economic pressures of the Great Depression, nearly 2 million Mexican Americans – more than half US citizens – were forced out of their homes and unconstitutionally deported to free up jobs for “real Americans”. Valenciana’s mother’s family was among them.
“The raids that took place at the time were not unlike now,” said Valenciana, 75.
Mexican “repatriation”, which Valenciana prefers to call “expulsion”, consisted of military-style raids, mass deportations, scare tactics and public pressure that terrorized Mexican communities and broke up countless families. For American children like Valenciana’s mother, who was born in 1926 in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the trauma was layered: leaving their home and country, adjusting to a new culture in Mexico and eventually returning to the US years later.
Emilia Castañeda, Valenciana’s mother, was seven when her own mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died less than a year later on the day of Emilia’s first communion. “She told me what bothered her the most about having to leave was that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mother’s grave,” remembered Valenciana, now an associate professor emeritus at the department of elementary and bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton. “They went to the train station and she and other people were crying.”
She told Valenciana that the girls in her school in Mexico referred to her as “repatriada”, which was meant as a put-down. “My mom was pretty miserable,” said Valenciana. By age 12, Emilia worked as a live-in babysitter, but at times she was not paid or given a decent bed or blanket, according to her daughter. Emilia was desperate to come back to Los Angeles once the repatriation period ended. During the second world war, she made the journey alone by train right before her 18th birthday with the help of her godmother, who gave her a place to live.
Along with Valenciana’s husband, Francisco Balderrama, who co-authored a seminal book on Mexican repatriation, Emilia eventually went on to become an advocate for others to learn about this previously hidden chapter in US history. In her 70s, she helped pass legislation that led to a formal apology from the state of California in 2005 and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. Emilia passed away in 2020 at age 94.
While Valenciana sees parallels between the 1930s and today, there’s one big difference, she says: “There’s much more support for people who are being kidnapped and tortured today as opposed to the 1930s where people either didn’t know or care.” She says she better understands what her mother and others like her experienced when she sees members of her community leaving the US voluntarily or living in hiding, fearful of going to church or the market because of Ice.
“I’m not just heartbroken,” she said. “I’m sad and angry. Racism is deeply rooted in this country.”
Felicia Lowe
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Felicia Lowe, 79, was never taught about Chinese American history. She had plenty of questions, but no answers. Her immigrant parents refused to talk about how they came to arrive in the US from China.
Lowe’s curiosity inspired her to become a television reporter and filmmaker, whose work has revealed the impact of Chinese exclusion, a series of racist immigration laws from 1882 to 1943 that restricted Chinese immigration to the US in response to growing anti-Chinese sentiment and competition for jobs.
After reading the book Island about the Angel Island immigration station in the San Francisco Bay, which opened in 1910 to enforce exclusion and prevent “undesirable” immigrants from entering the US, Lowe knew she had to share this little-known story. In 1988, she released a film about it, Carved in Silence.
“For all the immigrants, there was a very intrusive physical examination,” Lowe said. “Angel Island was built to jail people, to interrogate them and make them feel so unwanted.”
Immigrants were detained for months and years at a time in crowded, prison-like dorms with locked doors and separated by race and sex. The station processed up to 1 million Asian and other immigrants, including 250,000 who were Chinese, from 1910 to 1940. Since Chinese people were effectively barred from entering the US, “paper sons” and “paper daughters” circumvented exclusion by purchasing documents that falsely identified them as the children of Chinese Americans.
It wasn’t until after Lowe made Carved in Silence that she discovered a shocking secret about her own family’s history: her father had been detained for three weeks at Angel Island, according to transcripts from the National Archives.
“Every time people were interrogated, they had to sign their names,” she said. “On one of those documents, my father’s handwriting was very shaky and I thought he must have been really scared that day.” She realized her father, who died of a sudden heart attack at 58, had been a “paper son” himself, which gave Lowe an even deeper understanding of the trauma and cost of leaving one’s homeland, and entering a country that did not want you because of your ethnicity. “The risks taken required courage and hope, that the payoff would be a greater opportunity for himself and his future family,” she said.
Unlike the Angel Island era, where the public was largely unaware of detainees’ conditions and experiences, many of today’s immigration actions are being recorded on phones in real time and circulating online (the Trump administration has broadcast raids and regularly runs commercials encouraging people to “self-deport and stay out”). Lowe said people in 2025 have more evidence of their experiences and she believes that Ice’s hypervisibility has united people who may not have been activists to be more supportive of immigrants.
“What we’re witnessing today is wholesale harassment, arrests with little to no acknowledgement of a person’s legal status,” said Lowe, who has been a leader in the preservation and restoration of Angel Island as a national historic landmark. “Rights are being ignored and innocent immigrants and/or those who have proper paperwork to be here are being locked up and, in some cases, sent to jails in other countries.
“I don’t care what color you are – we need to understand how much we share humanity and pain. We cannot be afraid to tell our stories.”
Satsuki Ina
During the first Trump administration, Satsuki Ina made multiple visits to family immigration detention centers, where she met with Central American mothers and children who were being held by the US government after fleeing horrific violence.
“Mothers poured their hearts out about what was happening to their kids and I couldn’t help but see myself in those children,” she said. That’s because Ina, 81, herself was born behind barbed wire in a US concentration camp where she was formally listed as an “enemy alien” by the US government.
It was the second world war, and the US had rounded up and unconstitutionally imprisoned more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry based on unfounded national security fears over their race. Ina’s parents, who were US citizens, were first sent to California’s Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, where the smell of horses and manure lingered, then to Topaz prison camp in Utah.
After failing a loyalty questionnaire, the Inas were sent to the Tule Lake segregation center, a maximum-security concentration camp with 28 guard towers, 1,000 military police officers and tanks patrolling the perimeter. Overcrowded barracks were useless protection against choking dust storms, searing heat and snow.
While at Tule Lake, Ina’s father, Itaru, spoke out about his civil rights, which led to him being sent to a separate Department of Justice camp in Bismarck, North Dakota, that was less chaotic and filled with almost 4,000 German and Japanese men, leaving Ina’s mother, Shizuko, to raise two young children alone. After the war ended in 1945, the family was reunited at a camp in Crystal City, Texas, before finally being freed after four years of captivity. Ina had spent the first two years of her life imprisoned.
Her parents’ San Francisco home and property were seized in 1942, and the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Satsuki became Sandy. Years later, when Ina said she wanted to be called by her real name, her mother repeatedly said: “Don’t do it. Bad things will happen.”
“When I was a child, my mother tried to protect me from the stigma that was directed towards people who were resisters, so she would just say things like: ‘Don’t say you were born in Tule Lake. Just tell them you were born in Newell,’ which is nearby,” Ina remembered. “The message we were getting from our parents was: ‘You have to keep us safe. Don’t get into trouble, don’t cause problems.’ ”
Decades later, Ina, who is now a psychotherapist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, started connecting her experience with the expansion of family immigration detention first under the Obama administration and then during the first Trump administration, imprisoned children and separated Central American and South American families seeking asylum on a larger scale.
Together with activist Mike Ishii, she co-founded the group Tsuru for Solidarity to help end detention sites and support immigrant and refugee communities under attack. “We felt like we had the moral authority to stand up and protest,” said Ina. “I never set out to be an activist. I just mostly saw myself as someone who was pissed off about what was going on.”
It was only in the last half of Ina’s 40-year career as a psychotherapist that she started studying the effects of trauma and how it could be passed down to subsequent generations. She found that many Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated as children struggled with anxiety and depression as adults. Last year, she published a memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, which follows the Ina family’s agonizing journey through incarceration, based on her mother’s diary and censored letters her parents exchanged while held at separate prison camps.
“It’s more than 80 years since our incarceration and the effects of it are still impacting my community,” said Ina. “The mass incarceration solution is the most dehumanizing, long-term impact for whole communities. To imprison children, in particular, is inhumane and damaging. I think about the children I interviewed, and the amount of anxiety and depression that they’ve been filled with doesn’t get erased when you’re freed. It lies in you with each stage of life.”
Eliseo Medina
After growing up in Huanusco, Zacatecas, in Mexico, Eliseo Medina, 79, came to the US with his family in 1956. His parents worked in the fields of Delano, California, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin valley known for its grapes, while he attended school. When he was a boy, immigration raids, arrests and deportations were commonplace. He recalled hearing loud knocks at the front door of their modest home in the middle of the night. “We’d get up and go to the door and find lights shining on our faces,” said Medina, whose family were legal immigrants. “These guys in uniform were there asking for our papers – we had no idea we had any rights.” Like today, these farm workers were mostly immigrants and their wages were often lower than US-born counterparts and workers in other sectors.
Medina left school at 15 to join his parents and sisters working in the fields. In 1965, when Medina was off work due to a broken leg, he heard that Filipino farmworkers in Coachella had walked out on strike demanding $1.40 an hour and that they were coming to Delano next. He grabbed his crutches, got in his car and drove to 11th Avenue, where he saw about 200 people with signs shouting: “Huelga! Strike!” Although he was scared, Medina attended his first union meeting inside a local church just days after the historic Delano grape strike and boycott began. It happened to be Mexican Independence Day, which felt symbolic, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
“Every seat was taken, people were standing around the walls and there was electricity,” he recalled. “Cesar Chavez walked out and he talked about how we had rights even though we were poor, that we deserved to be treated with respect and dignity, that we sold our labor, not our souls.” Chavez called for a strike, and the whole hall erupted, chanting: “Huelga, huelga, huelga!” Exhilarated by what he had witnessed, Medina went home, broke open his piggy bank and joined the union and grape strike the next morning.
“We went against some of the biggest growers and I saw them being scared for the first time and I got hooked,” he said. Dolores Huerta took a shine to the 19-year-old and recruited him to represent United Farm Workers (UFW) at rallies. Over the next 13 years, he worked alongside Chavez, leading boycotting efforts and organizing fundraisers and rallies around the country, and eventually became UFW’s national vice-president.
“It was the most exciting thing that any person could have ever experienced for me,” he said. Medina later worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), pushing for equal labor and civil rights protections for workers. In 2013, the labor leader participated in a 22-day hunger strike on the National Mall, where he was visited by Barack Obama, to draw attention to the need for immigration reform.
Medina, who lives just outside Los Angeles, sees sustained protests against Ice and other Trump administration policies as building the foundation for maintaining democracy and modernizing the immigration system. “It’s dark right now, but it’s also a great opportunity for organizers because people are paying attention across our society,” said Medina. “People are asking: ‘Who am I? Who is this country? What do I care about? What are my values?’”
Some California farm workers are on strike following immigration raids at several farms, calling for an end to raids and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers (the United Farm Workers has not yet called for a strike or boycott). “I certainly understand and support their right to be heard and respected,” he said. “They are striking against a cruel and unusual government. In the end, they may lead the way for a broader worker response.”
He said that the diversity of the anti-Trump coalition, and the public image of Ice as armed, masked soldiers terrorizing people, is helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. “I’ve been doing this almost 60 years. I saw the farm workers win, civil rights, a war ended. I saw women make huge impacts. I saw gay rights,” he reflected. “When you change minds, you also change policies and the laws, so I have hope.”
