Who gets deported in the U.S.?

As immigration crackdowns intensify, a new project uncovers how American laws shape who gets expelled and who gets to stay.

Mapping Deportations — a digital collaboration five years in the making between three scholars at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law and incarceration data project Million Dollar Hoods — is the most comprehensive public data library to date of maps, timelines and data tracing U.S. deportation policy back to 1895.

The site’s featured “missing map” plots every U.S. deportation order since 1895, the earliest year that federal data is available by region. 

Of the more than 8 million orders on the map, over 96% are issued to majority-nonwhite countries, with Mexico overwhelmingly representing the highest number annually since 1916.

The interactive timelines, visualizations and quotes from lawmakers across history draw explicit connections between racialized forced removals in the distant and recent past; for instance, Operation Wetback, in 1954, when law enforcement used military tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some citizens — from the U.S., and the ongoing nationwide Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that began this year.

Past and present parallels 

These historical connections “help to answer questions the map raises, like ‘Isn’t it obvious that you’d have more deportations to Mexico … because there’s more people here from Mexico?’” said Ahilan Arulanantham, Mapping Deportations co-creator and faculty co-director at CILP, at a Friday, September 19 American Community Media briefing.

“Well, our timeline shows that in 1929, when there was a huge wave of white supremacist ideology driving immigration policy, around the same time they banned virtually all immigration from Asia and Africa, they passed the registry provision — a rolling amnesty,” he explained.

“It’s still in immigration law to this day, and what it says is, if somebody has been in the country unlawfully since a certain date, and they’re still here now, as long as they’re not otherwise inadmissible, like having been convicted of a disqualifying crime, they can just pay a fine and adjust their status,” Arulanantham continued. “80% of the people who qualified in the first decade were from Europe and Canada.”

In the decades that followed, however, the provision was updated to restrict the years in which one could qualify for amnesty — most recently in 1982, when only residents in the country since 1972 could qualify.

“The law only makes it a crime to enter without inspection. It does not make it a crime to overstay your visa, said Arulanantham. “Immigration enforcement is usually based on a legal basis, but what we’re trying to interrogate is why those laws are the way they are …  The laws and procedures change all the time, but it’s amazing how constant the effect of deportation is over time.”

“It’s clear that the racial disparity in enforcement grows over time,” said Mapping Deportations cartographer Mariah Tso, a G.I.S. Specialist at Million Dollar Hoods. “And deportation is just one tactic that’s used for forced removal. Voluntary departures are the most common type of enforcement overall.”

“Our animated data shows, for instance, coercive indigenous removal in the expansion of U.S. territory at the same time that all of these states and territories are enacting bans on black migration,” she continued.

The website features similar parallels between statements by past and present politicians driving immigration enforcement.

“This idea that the blood of our country will be poisoned by morally deficient and contagious people, riff-raff and scum from other countries, is an idea that is all over the 1920s in immigration policy,” said Arulanantham. “Well, in 2023, President Trump started repeating this lie that Venezuela had emptied its prisons and mental health institutions to send those people into the United States … We also connected it to a later lie that Haitians were eating people’s dogs and cats, both of which are debunked.”

A forced migration

“For me, this project came from a set of lectures I was giving in 2019 on the three forced migrations that made modern America by unpeopling the land … the expulsion of Native nations, the transatlantic slave trade and mass deportations,” said Mapping Deportations co-creator Kelly Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA and founding director of Million Dollar Hoods.

While many interactive maps and timelines were available online for her to use with her students concerning the first two migrations, no such resources were available for the third.

“I knew as a historian that there had been more than 50 million deportation orders in U.S. history, which is a mind-boggling number, but no one had really scraped the data and created a dynamic map showing over time the patterns of deportation … At what point are there certain laws that target certain communities for removal? What are the enforcement priorities over time, and how do those change? All of that affects who is actually getting apprehended and removed from the country,” Hernández explained.

Mapping Deportations “tries to provide the world in which this data is being created,” she continued. “By showing the U.S. immigration system as structured as a ‘whites-only’ system, what it’s trying to suggest is not that all non-white immigrants were kept out of the country, but that the U.S. immigration system is a system of racialized power rooted in rules determining who’s allowed to enter the country on what terms, and who could be kicked out and under what terms.”

“That’s true even to this day. Look at the laws under the Biden administration which allowed over half a million Ukrainians to come, including many on the parole program, but the comparable programs for Afghans were incredibly harsh … and they were deporting Haitians en masse at the same time they were allowing Ukrainians to enter,” added Arulanantham.

“Racial discrimination even now is driving who gets to come in and also who gets deported — and that was even before we had the white South African refugee program, which allowed them to jump the line over so many refugees from other countries,” he continued.

“What is happening now is simply an escalation of a system that’s already been pre-built and in place,” said Hernández. “There’s nothing phenomenally new to all of this. We haven’t invented much. We’re pulling the levers that were already built.”