The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has issued a formal apology to people of Mexican descent for repatriating their ancestors some 80 years ago.

The Los Angeles Daily News reported that the board issued a formal apology for the county’s participation in a drive to relocate more than one million people to Mexico from 1929 through 1944.

In Los Angeles County, the largest county in the U.S., four-point-six million of its ten-million population are Latino and most of the Latino population are people of Mexican ancestry.

During the Great Depression, local governments of the U.S. rounded up and forcefully sent back more than two-million Mexican immigrants, blaming them for stealing jobs from Americans.