Mexicans file claim over US 'deportation'

This iconic image came to symbolise white frustration at unemployment during the Great Depression (Library of Congress)

Hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent have filed a mass claim demanding compensation for allegedly being forcibly deported from the United States during the Depression.

About 400,000 people are suing Los Angeles city and county for the "irreparable loss" they suffered when they were allegedly uprooted to prevent them from taking "white" jobs.

They say they were wrongly sent to Mexico between 1929-33 when 13 million Americans lived in unemployment in the years after the Wall Street stock market crash.

Beverly Hills law firm, Kiesel, Boucher & Larson, acting for the group, claims the programme of deportation was a "co-ordinated, aggressive campaign to remove people of Mexican ancestry from California in large numbers."

"We have to recognise that in the 1930s we used the Mexican population as a scapegoat," Raymond Boucher told the Los Angeles Times.

"Until we take an honest look in the mirror, none of us is truly safe."

Expulsion

The claimants say Los Angeles county and city officials violated their constitutional rights by wrongly expelling them from their homes in the US.

Emilia Castaneda, a US national and one of the plaintiffs who has brought the case, was nine-years old when she was told she must leave her home in 1935.

She was then sent to Mexico by train.

She was only allowed to return a decade later when the US needed extra workers to help during World War II.

Miss Castaneda and the hundreds of thousands of other claimants say they were expelled to eliminate job competition for "Americans" during the Depression.

The deportations also served to reduce the amount of money "that would have otherwise been spent to help aid destitute individuals of Mexican ancestry," they claim.