At an ACOM briefing, UCLA researchers launched Mapping Deportations, a project revealing how deportation has historically targeted immigrants from non-white countries.
At a recent ethnic media briefing hosted by the American Community Media (ACOM), three UCLA scholars introduced Mapping Deportations: A History of Bias — Who Gets Deported in the United States?, a sweeping digital project that traces more than a century of deportation policy.
Developed by UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) in collaboration with the Million Dollar Hoods project, the initiative offers something the U.S. has never had before: a comprehensive map of every deportation order from 1895 to 2022. The visualizations, timelines, and historical analysis reveal a stark truth — deportation has never been a neutral policy tool. Instead, it has consistently targeted immigrants from non-white countries, embedding racial exclusion into the very fabric of immigration law.
The panel featured Kelly Lytle Hernández, Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA and founding director of Million Dollar Hoods; Mariah Tso, G.I.S. Specialist with Million Dollar Hoods; and Ahilan Arulanantham, Faculty Co-Director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy. Speaking to ethnic media reporters across the country, the three researchers made the case that deportation policy can only be understood as part of America’s longer history of forced removals.
Three Forced Migrations
Lytle Hernández opened the discussion by placing deportation in a lineage of displacement central to U.S. nation-building. She called them the “three forced migrations that made modern America by unpeopling the land”: the expulsion of Native nations, the transatlantic slave trade, and mass deportation.
Visualizations already existed for the first two — maps of Indigenous land loss through wars and treaties, and an animation of the transatlantic slave trade that traces 12 million Africans kidnapped and brought to the Americas. But, she noted, “there was never a video about mass deportation.”
As a historian, she knew the numbers were staggering: more than 50 million deportation orders issued in U.S. history. Yet no one had scraped the data, much less animated it. That gap sparked Mapping Deportations. Working with Tso, who had already been charting incarceration patterns for Million Dollar Hoods, Hernández set out to build the missing map.
A Map of Removal
The result is a feature map plotting deportation orders from 1895 to 2022. Each dot represents orders issued in a given year; the larger the dot, the larger the number. In total, over 8 million deportation orders appear on the map, with numbers still growing.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. “Over 96 percent of deportation orders have been issued to people from predominantly non-white countries,” Tso explained. “That’s not random. It’s a reflection of policies steeped in racism.”
Since 1916, Mexico has held the top spot for deportations every single year. The site’s racing bar chart — which tracks the top five deportation targets annually — drives the point home. Before 1934, the government even classified deportees by “race” or “peoples.” Afterward, it shifted to “nationality.” The categories changed, but the outcomes did not.
Tso encouraged journalists to engage with the map multiple times, slowing, pausing, and revisiting. “As you view the map, write down your questions,” she said. “What surprises you? Did you notice that Mexico has continuously been at the top for more than a century? Why is that? How has deportation been used as a tool for racial banishment?”
Law, Litigation, and Continuity
For Arulanantham, the maps resonated with decades of work as a litigator challenging immigration policy in federal court. “Policies change every seven minutes,” he told reporters. “But the outcome of deportation has remained strikingly constant.”
He cited the disparate application of Title 42 during the pandemic. While the policy expelled Haitians and Central Americans en masse, Ukrainians were broadly exempt. Similarly, he pointed to the federal statute criminalizing “illegal reentry,” passed in 1929 during the eugenics movement. Despite clear evidence of its racist origins, the law remains enforced today.
“The government is not allowed to enforce laws motivated by race discrimination,” he emphasized. “And yet, that is exactly what continues.”
Reporters Push the Panel
Ethnic media journalists pressed the scholars with pointed questions. One reporter from Philippine News Today asked whether deportation bias was simply a matter of whim or had real legal grounding. Arulanantham responded that while deportations almost always rest on laws, those very laws often reflect racial intent. “The question isn’t whether there’s a legal basis,” he said. “It’s why those laws were written as they are. And history shows that race has always been at the core.”
Another reporter asked whether the U.S. could realistically “become a white nation again.” Lytle Hernández clarified that the United States never was purely white by demographics. The system, she said, was never about complete exclusion but about subordination — ensuring that non-white communities remained present but marginalized. “From enslavement and Jim Crow to mass incarceration and deportation,” she explained, “the rules and rituals of white supremacy have kept non-white groups in subordinated positions, not eliminated them.”
The questions underscored why ethnic media’s role is so critical: challenging assumptions and forcing clarity on how historical legacies continue to shape current realities.
Five Eras of Immigration Control
To interpret the map’s patterns, the team built out a timeline dividing U.S. immigration history into five eras:
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1790–1875: Roots of U.S. Immigration Control — Laws excluding free Black migrants amid Native removal. The 1803 Immigration Act barred “Negro, free persons of color” from entering certain states, especially amid fears sparked by the Haitian Revolution.
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1876–1929: White’s Only Immigration Regime — Asian immigration was virtually barred, free Black migration blocked, and Mexican entry criminalized. By 1929, Congress had codified a racialized system of exclusion.
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1930–1954: Consolidate and Carry Forward — The Cold War brought amendments but not abolition. Deportation campaigns like Operation Wetback in 1954 echoed the same racialized logic.
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1955–1990: Amend and Enforce — Despite the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended explicit national-origin quotas, racial profiling remained. In 1975, the Supreme Court’s Brignoni-Ponce ruling legitimized the use of race in immigration enforcement.
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1991–Present: Deportation Nation — The U.S. has built the world’s largest deportation system, issuing more than 7 million deportations and 25 million voluntary departures since 1991.
“Each era shows how racism was baked into the system,” Hernández explained. “It has never been fully purged. In fact, it has been reinvented.”
Visualizing the Bias
Beyond the feature map, Mapping Deportations offers 15 visualizations, each corresponding to a historical era. One shows deportations by year in racing bar charts. Another highlights “Beyond Deportation” — voluntary departures, exclusions, and expulsions under Title 42.
The project also visualizes how U.S. expansion through Indigenous removal coincided with laws barring Black migration, illustrating how different systems of exclusion reinforced each other. Another map explores the so-called “White Man’s Republic,” charting how exclusion was structured not just by law but by ritual and practice.
To guide readers, the maps include questions as compasses: Who is racialized? Who is criminalized? Who is banned, barred, and capped?
Finally, the site closes with Futureware, a speculative visualization that runs deportation history in reverse. Instead of dots flowing outward in removal, they move back in — imagining what it would mean to undo a century of exclusion.
Historical Connections to Today
The timeline also draws explicit links between past and present. For example, the 1929 Registry Act created a rolling amnesty that overwhelmingly benefited Europeans and Canadians. “If updated today,” Arulanantham explained, “it would legalize millions of Mexicans and Central Americans. That’s why it hasn’t been updated since 1986.”
Similarly, the use of parole programs for Ukrainians in recent years contrasts sharply with the limited avenues available to Haitians and Afghans. “I welcome Ukrainians being admitted,” Arulanantham said. “But it is impossible to ignore the racial disparity in who receives protection.”
Resistance Through Time
The briefing also highlighted stories of resistance. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century led some of the earliest legal challenges to exclusionary laws. In the mid-20th century, immigrants like David Hyun fought detention cases that continue to shape immigration law.
More recently, litigation around Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has revealed how communities mobilize against termination efforts. When former President Trump rejected a bipartisan proposal to protect TPS holders, dismissing immigrants from “shithole countries,” lawsuits followed. Courts have at times blocked these efforts, though recent rulings by the Supreme Court have allowed terminations to proceed.
“Every generation has fought these policies,” Arulanantham said. “The map is not just about removal. It’s also about resilience.”
Why It Matters
For ethnic media reporters, Mapping Deportations offers a critical resource. By connecting present debates to a century of precedent, it equips journalists to show their audiences that today’s policies are not isolated.
“The Supreme Court may not want to hear history,” Arulanantham told the briefing. “But the public needs to. Honest accounts of the past are essential if we are to break the cycles of exclusion that define our present.”
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