 Many of the deportations were overseen by state and local authorities who acted on the encouragement of Doak and the Department of Labor.During the 1930s, approximately one million Mexican Americans were forcibly "repatriated" to Mexico; approximately sixty percent of those deported were birthright citizens.According to legal professor Kevin R. Johnson, the repatriation campaign meets the modern legal standards of ethnic cleansing, as it involved the forced removal of a racial minority by government actors.