SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Patricia Aguayo remembers the day in 1989 she was felt like she was a different class of American citizen.

She was at Club Elegante, a Mission District nightclub, when San Francisco police officers walked in followed by immigration agents.

“They locked the door and said nobody could leave. People were scared. Who was ever to think that this was going to turn into a deportation,” recalled Aguayo.

Immigration agents asked everyone for identification, including the workers and musicians.

Aguayo, who was born in San Francisco, felt racially profiled so she refused to show her I.D.

“I was not going to show them anything because if I were Anglo they would not have asked me for documentation,” said Aguayo. “I was legally here I wanted to let them know that they were not going to just profile people and assume that everybody in that club was undocumented.”

Patricia and the ACLU of Northern California filed a class-action lawsuit claiming immigration agents violated their constitutional rights by detaining and questioning them simply because they were Latino. They won.

The incident shaped the future of San Francisco politics.

At the time, San Francisco was a sanctuary for Central American refugees who faced deportation.

After the nightclub raid, the city adopted a more expansive sanctuary policy and forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration agents.

Immigrant advocates say raids at places where Latinos gather may come back under the Trump administration.

“The last time President Trump was in office, one of the one of the places that was subject to immigration raids were 7-Eleven stores and convenience stores and in relatively low budget stores in neighborhoods where Latinos were heavily populated,” said Kevin Johnson, professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law.

Johnson said the intention of public raids is to make undocumented immigrants so afraid of being apprehended while grocery shopping or dropping their children off at school that they will leave the country on their own, a type of self-deportation.

The United States has had two previous mass deportations of primarily Mexican immigrants in the last 100 years.

The first happened during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high and many people blamed people of Mexican ancestry of taking jobs meant for Americans.

Local and state police carried out the mass arrests.

“People were rounded up who looked Mexican, were put on buses, trains driven by social workers even to the U.S.-Mexico border and dumped,” said Johnson.

It’s estimated up to a million people of Mexican ancestry were removed from the United States and returned to Mexico during what became known as the Mexican Repatriation.

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Some historians say two-thirds of those forced to leave were U.S. citizens, many of them children of immigrant parents.

Johnson called it a form of ethnic cleansing.

“They terrified communities and they violated the rule of law and they are what some would say is a national disgrace,” added Johnson.

A second mass deportation happened in the 1950s. It was called “Operation Wetback”, a racial slur used to describe Mexican immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande and got their backs wet.

“The US government carried a military type operation where immigration officials went to job sites, schools, and neighborhoods and deported immigrants who were caught there. Their family members often didn’t know where those people had been sent, what happened to them,” explains Anna Raquel Minian, author of ‘In the Shadow of Liberty’ and a professor of history at Stanford University.

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Just like the mass deportation two decades earlier, many of those deported were U.S. citizens.

“They couldn’t leave their children in the United States by themselves, so they were forced to take them with them, even though these children were American citizens. It was absolutely devastating,” said Minian.

Donald Trump has promised a mass deportation when he returns to the White House, starting with immigrants with criminal records or previous deportation orders.

“Prioritizing the people who pose the most danger and removing those people, that’s certainly going to happen. But it doesn’t mean that they’re going to just turn a blind eye to everybody else,” said Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

That was certainly the case in mid-January when agents from the U.S. Border Patrol arrested 78 people during a three-day operation in Kern County.

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The Border Patrol said among those arrested were a convicted sex offender and others with records or warrants for theft and drug possession.

The agency said “Operation Return to Sender” focused on “disrupting the transportation routes used by Transnational Criminal Organizations.”

But agents were videotaped casting a wider net. Footage from a Chevron gas station in Bakersfield shows agents questioning Latino customers.

“Law enforcement goes through these processes all the time. That’s how they identify the people that they’re going to target. It doesn’t mean that there’s going to be racial profiling,” said Mehlman.

Children born in the United States with undocumented parents could again be caught in the net.

In an interview with NewsNation, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants could be held in halfway houses if they are caught in a mass deportation.

“As Tom Homan has said, that there is no reason why people have to be separated from their families. They can make a choice. It is their choice to either go home with their entire family, or to go home and leave the parts of their family that are citizens in this country,” explained Mehlman.

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Johnson said these type of mass deportations have left a stain in the country.

“We had citizen children who were in effect deported with their parents and in effect told even though you’re a citizen, you’re not a citizen like white Americans,” said Johnson. ” It had tremendous impact on the sense of belonging of people of Mexican ancestry in the United States and it lingers to this day in certain ways.”