November 1929 and December 1931, about 200,000 Mexicans left the United States. While a large number willingly departed to Mexico, a significant number were explicitly pressured to leave through state and local repatriation programs. These programs responded to the Depression's severe effects in Mexican and Mexican American communities by promoting deportation. Some scholars contend that the unprecedented number of deportations and repatriations between 1929 and 1933 was part of an "explicit Hoover administration policy", and the manufactured climate of fear was meant to coerce Mexicans into self-repatriating. In fact, local welfare workers did regularly collaborate with immigration officials to provide the names of ethnic Mexicans seeking Depression relief so they might be repatriated. During the Repatriation period, local government and federal officials also collaborated in "street sweeps" and "full-scale paramilitary" raids in majority-Mexican neighborhoods to find undocumented migrants and to terrorize others in the community to repatriate. In addition to welfare officials, charitable aid agencies worked with state and local governments to provide names of Mexican and Mexican American families seeking aid. Charities also sometimes provided money to pay for one-way tickets to Mexico. In all, the INS formally deported around 82,000 Mexicans from 1929 to 1935, while the remaining 320,000 repatriated were considered "voluntary". Of the total number of people who left the United States during the Mexican Repatriation, around half were U.S. citizens. New Deal labor During the New Deal era, Mexican American labor unions made significant strides in organizing; however, they still often faced outright violence. In September 1933, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union led a massive strike of cotton pickers in the San Joaquin Valley, California. One contemporary writer later described the mobilization of strikers as "an army of brown skinned people". In response, the growers initiated an all-out war to avoid paying the strikers higher wages. They began with a propaganda campaign, claiming the strike was being agitated by a radical-left "Communist menace", rather than the workers themselves who were fighting against endemic low wages and horrific working conditions. Next, the farm owners created armed militias. One, Pixley's Farmers Protection Association, had 600 enrolled members. The farm owners then went after local business owners in town, threatening dire consequences to any business which sold the strikers food. Then, the farmers evicted all striking pickers and their families from their homes, which were usually shacks on the cotton ranches. When the strikers still refused