When the deportation of an illegal immigrant united L.A. to bring him back

Los Angeles Times

14-05-2025

When I think about the gleeful cruelty the Trump administration is showing toward illegal immigrants — including unlawfully deporting planeloads of them, seeking to suspend habeas corpus in order to kick out folks faster and wearing fancy Rolex watches while visiting a Salvadoran super prison — I think of Jose Toscano.
The Mexico City native came to Los Angeles as a 13-year-old and enrolled at St. Turibius School near the Fashion District, working at Magee's Kitchen in the Farmers Market to pay his tuition, room and board. 'I had this dream to come to the United States for education,' Toscano told The Times in May 1953. 'Not for the dollars, not to work in the camps for 65 cents an hour.'
Why was The Times profiling a 16-year-old Mexican immigrant? Because he was about to get deported. Politicians, the press and private citizens had been railing against 'illegal immigration' and pushing President Eisenhower for mass deportations. Officers received a tip that Toscano was in the country illegally.
Newspaper accounts noted that immigration authorities — struck by Toscano's pluck and drive — made sure that his deportation didn't go on his record so he could legally return one day. A Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet columnist wrote, 'We must have immigration laws — but they're not designed for folks like Joe.'
Meanwhile, The Times' editorial board — not exactly known back then for its kind attitude toward Mexican Americans — argued that Toscano shouldn't be deported, making the case that laws 'should perhaps be tempered a trifle in the face of principles and actions which are of such sterling worth as to be beyond the object of the law itself.'
Toscano legally returned to Los Angeles three months later, living with a white family in Whittier that sponsored him and enrolling at Cathedral High. 'As I continue to study the history of your country in school,' he wrote to The Times that September, 'I shall remember that what you did for me is one of the things that makes this country of yours so great.'
His story was such a feel-good tale that it appeared in Reader's Digest and the local press checked in on Toscano for years. The Mirror, The Times' afternoon sister paper, reported on his 1954 wedding, the same year that immigration officials deported over a million Mexican nationals under Operation Wetback, a program that President Trump and his supporters say they want to emulate today.
Two years later, The Times covered Toscano's graduation from Fairfax High, where he told the crowd as the commencement speaker that he wanted to become an American citizen 'so that I, too, can help build a greater America.'
After a three-year stint in the Marines, Toscano did just that in 1959, changing his legal name from Jose to Joseph because he felt 'it's more American that way,' he told the Mirror. He told the paper he had dreams of attending UCLA Law School, but life didn't work out that way.
The last clipping I found of Toscano in The Times is a 1980 Farmers Market ad, which noted that he was a widower with two daughters still working at Magee's but had advanced from washing dishes to chief carver.
'He's a happy man who likes his work,' the ad said, 'and it shows.'
Rereading the clips about Toscano, I'm reminded of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who established a life for himself in this country before he was deported in March despite a judge's order that he be allowed to remain in the United States.
This time around, immigration officials and the Trump White House have insisted Abrego Garcia deserved his fate, sliming him as a terrorist and MS-13 member despite no evidence to back up their assertions.
Toscano's story shows that the story can have a different ending — if only immigration officials have a heart.
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Today's great photo is from Times photographer Juliana Yamada at the Kia Forum where fans flocked to see legendary singers Chaka Khan, Patti LaBelle, Stephanie Mills and Gladys Knight perform their greatest hits.
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