Ignacio Pina was 6 when immigration officers came to his Montana home, held his family behind bars for a week, then herded them onto a train bound for Mexico -- a country he and his five siblings had never seen. "They just kicked us out with what we were wearing," the U.S.-born Pina recalls more than 70 years later. It was 1931, the first year of a decadelong effort to remove Mexicans to free up jobs in a U.S. economy mired in the Great Depression. Estimates of the number of people caught in the raids range from 500,000 to 2 million, with researchers agreeing that they included tens of thousands of legal immigrants, as well as children like Pina who were born in the United States. "Mexican Repatriation," authorized by President Hoover and carried out in cooperation with local authorities, targeted areas with large Hispanic populations, mostly in California, Texas and Michigan. [more
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