Justice / Retrieval

Los Angeles’ 1936 ‘Bum Blockade’ Targeted American Migrants Fleeing Hardship During the Depression

The two-month patrol stopped “suspicious” individuals from crossing into California. But its execution was uneven, and the initiative proved controversial.

by Olatunji Osho-Williams via Smithsonian Magazine on July 24, 2025

...Davis took matters into his own hands and began the Bum Blockade, citing a 1933 anti-indigent state law as justification for his course of action. Though Davis contacted sheriffs in multiple border counties to deputize his LAPD officers and legitimize the blockade, only three agreed to his request.

Beginning on February 3, 1936, the LAPD sent 136 officers to patrol 16 points along California’s 700-mile border with Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. “Veritable Army Corps Formed,” read the February 4 front page of the Los Angeles Times. Working with railroad executives and county sheriffs, these officers stopped trains, vehicles and hitchhikers, turning away those they deemed suspicious. Though Davis claimed the blockade refused entry to around 11,000 people by March 31, historians have since cast doubt on this figure, suggesting the actual total was much lower.

The patrol’s criteria for determining whether someone “belonged in California” was vague and largely up to individual officers’ discretion, writes Lascher in The Golden Fortress. He explains:

Most detainees exhibited some subjective characteristics of poverty, such as piles of weather-beaten luggage teetering atop a rickety jalopy or bindles sagging behind weary men hiking into the state. … Officers tended to wave shiny new Packards through their checkpoints but halted sputtering early-model Fords pulling makeshift trailers and caked with half a continent’s dust.

During the initial stop, officers fingerprinted the potential detainees to check if they had criminal records. Some who didn’t have warrants out for their arrest received the option of turning around and leaving California. Others were sent to “jails that might be little more than makeshift cells in rooms rented at off-season hotels in communities near the checkpoints,” according to Lascher’s book. Before long, the stream of migrants flooding into California had slowed significantly.

A December 1936 newspaper article about the Los Angeles "Bum Blockade" — A December 1936 newspaper article about the Los Angeles Bum Blockade Lincoln Star via Newspapers.com

“The ‘California, Here I Come’ marching song of penniless wanderers faded away to a faint whisper in Arizona today,” United Press observed on February 6. The previous night, the news agency reported, officers stopped three trains in Yuma, Arizona, detaining 14 “transients.” That same evening, just 20 or so people lingered at a hobo “jungle” in Phoenix that usually hosted nearly 100 overnight guests.

As the Bum Blockade policed California’s border, Davis simultaneously continued to enforce harsh vagrancy laws in Los Angeles itself, searching for “indigents who can be prosecuted as vagabonds,” according to the Los Angeles Times. On February 8, the LAPD arrested 122 people deemed to fit these parameters, many of whom Davis claimed had criminal records.

What happened to detainees after their arrest? A week into the blockade, Davis announced plans to put the migrants—many of them imprisoned in penitentiaries far from the state line—to work, assigning them to unpaid, forced manual labor like quarrying rock, sand and gravel for public projects.