The United States has long struggled with its standing as a country offering freedom and opportunity to people from around the world. Even though it was founded as a nation of immigrants and has offered refuge to millions of people across generations, the U.S.’ immigration law and policy also has been silently guided by an invisible hand of racism and xenophobia. Nowhere is that more evident than in American immigration enforcement.
To better understand this history, UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, law professor Ahilan Arulanantham and cartographer Mariah Tso have partnered to tell the story of the origins of immigration policy by mapping government data on deportees.
The Mapping Deportations Project offers a comprehensive look at the history of migration and deportation in this country, while showing how federal laws and policies have been shaped by race-driven actions. The project unmasks the discriminatory, race-based patterns that repeat year after year, and it shines a light on the inequity of enforcement.
“For more than two centuries, U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-White migrants for exclusion, removal and punishment,” the project website says. “Although U.S. immigration law and policy have shifted over time, the nation’s immigration enforcement regime has consistently produced this result.”
Using publicly available data, Tso created a series of multimedia maps, charts and graphs that track historical waves of immigration in the United States. These interactive visuals not only bring U.S. history to life but also challenge notions of just how open and accepting this country really is.
The timeline
Anchoring the project is a timeline that provides a detailed look at the history and policies behind the numbers. The timeline begins in 1790, when Congress approved the first naturalization law, which applied only to “free White persons,” and extended the possibility of citizenship to any such person who had resided in the country for at least two years, was subject to its jurisdiction and was of “good character.”
From there, the timeline is broken into five eras that track the evolution of immigration and deportation while highlighting key events and actions during each period. An interactive collection of quotes from historical figures in politics and government provides additional context.
So, who gets deported?
Of the more than 8.4 million deportation orders issued since 1895, when the government first began publishing annual deportation data, 96% of deportees were from non-White-majority countries, with 7.4 million from Mexico and Central America. This striking figure is one of many on the main animated map, which shows how the focus of deportations shifted throughout time — from Irish to Germans to Japanese to Chinese — before overwhelmingly settling into a decades-long trend targeting Mexicans, followed by Central and South Americans.
But deportation orders are not the only method of expulsion. For example, the government may encourage individuals to leave “voluntarily.” These departures, which date to the Alien Acts passed during the Thomas Jefferson administration, account for 49.2 million removals, or an estimated 90% of all forced removals since 1927.
“We realized we needed a separate visualization because there are other types of banishment,” Tso said, noting that for the “voluntary” departures category, “we put quotations marks around it, because it’s quite a coercive process.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, both the Trump and Biden administrations used Title 42 expulsion orders to restrict border immigration and limit asylum requests. By invoking this 1944 public health law, the government turned away 2.4 million people, including about 15,000 asylum seekers from Haiti, who were seeking refuge from political unrest in that country in 2021. The same year, the United States permitted entry for refugees from the Ukraine who were fleeing war with Russia.
“The differential in treatment, allowing virtually unconstrained migration of people from Ukraine coupled with stringent limits on people trying to come from Afghanistan, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries facing very, very dire humanitarian situations, was striking,” Arulanantham said. “How could this be happening?”
Exclusion orders, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1862, added 695,000 to the tally. In recent years, the U.S. government terminated the Temporary Protected Status of 400,000 immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Nepal, Honduras and Sudan — many of whom had been living in this country for decades.
The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court in March to end deportation protections for Haitians. If the court agrees, it could make 350,000 Haitians living in the United States today subject to deportation.
Hidden removals
A section on “hidden data” shows the erasure of Indigenous people from deportation figures. No data exists on the number of Indigenous people who have been removed, excluded and punished by the U.S. immigration system, according to the website. “As an Indigenous person myself,” said Tso, who is Diné (Navajo), “I know intimately what it means to be erased in data and how statistical genocide functions when Indigenous people are removed because they’re statistically insignificant or too small.
“It’s especially apparent just how persistent anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity are in this entire story, and how it really is about racially engineering the U.S. population.”
Law professor Arulanantham has spent a career navigating the immigration landscape. As a senior counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, where he worked for nearly two decades, Arulanantham has argued scores of immigrant rights cases, including the landmark 2013 class-action suit, Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, which established the right to legal representation for detainees with serious mental disabilities.
He has testified before Congress and argued before the Supreme Court. But a desire to teach led him to the UCLA Law School in 2021 as a professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. The center, Arulanantham said, offered him a chance to bridge the divide between academia and legal practice. “There was a lot of interesting work happening in these two streams,” he said, “but not a huge amount of cross-pollination.”
Once at the center, Arulanantham, along with co-director Hiroshi Motomura, launched an effort to trace the origins of statutes and federal administrative policy on immigration.
“I was working on trying to unearth the history of race discrimination that underlies a lot of prominent immigration law — both statutory law and constitutional law,” he said. “We found there were a lot of foundational legal rules that trace their origins back to periods of American history when we had open, naked racism motivating immigration law and policy.”
At the same time, Professor Hernández, the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History, and Tso, who is a GIS mapping specialist at the Ralph J. Bunche Center, were already at work on an animated map that illustrated the history of deportation.
While lecturing on the three forced migrations that shaped modern America — the expulsion of Native nations, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and mass deportation — Hernández found scholars had created maps for the first two but, she said, “No one had ever mapped every recorded deportation in U.S. history. So I was interested in seeing if we could pull this together.”
Hernández was completing a book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control. It had been illustrated by Tso, and is due out in September. Both were ready for a new project.
Work began on the deportation map in 2019.
The two initially created and began workshopping a pilot map depicting who was targeted for removal from the country. “The whole idea started with the main map,” Tso said, “but as we got more familiar with how complicated the dataset was, it turned into an entire website.”
Through a number of channels, Hernández and Arulanantham, both MacArthur “genius grant” fellows, heard about each other’s work.
Their collaboration expanded the reach of the project from both a history perspective and a legal perspective.
Racial animus and government action
“There’s a particularly strong thread of legal history in the timeline,” Hernández said. “We did the periodization, which is typically the work of historians, but Ahilan brought a litigator’s eye to that periodization, which was really important to make it an applied tool.”
For Arulanantham, the project’s findings help bolster arguments on the need for change in the judicial system. Supreme Court rulings, such as cases that uphold a Muslim ban, or stay orders that allow for the termination of Temporary Protective Status for Venezuelans and Haitians, are built on precedents created by earlier decisions in cases from the Chinese Exclusion era of the 1890s, he said, that were motivated by racial animus.
Some laws, Arulanantham said, like the illegal reentry after deportation statute — one of the most prosecuted federal crimes in the United States — date back to “a very explicitly eugenic era” in the 1920s.
“It’s crystal clear that governmental action motivated by racial animus is unconstitutional. That’s the doctrine,” he said. “In my view, there’s no reason why that constitutional prohibition should be understood not to apply to courts.”
Balancing the applied legal tool for litigators with the desire to create an educational resource for K-12 history students was challenging, Hernández said. “We wanted to reach all of them, so that took a lot of workshopping and a lot of refinement. But I think we got there.”
For all three researchers, their immigration work has deep, personal meaning.
Arulanantham recalls growing up in Lancaster, the son of Sri Lankan immigrants whose modest home became a refuge for large numbers of extended family members and others fleeing war in Sri Lanka until they could find their footing and move on.
“That profoundly shaped me,” he said. “It’s not like I decided when I was 11 that I was going to do refugee and immigration work. But by the time I went to law school, I knew I wanted to do work on human rights in Sri Lanka or refugee and immigration law in the U.S.”
Hernández, who is African American, grew up in San Diego and witnessed first-hand what she called “the racial policing that was unfolding in plain sight, but that nobody was talking about. The Border Patrol and their operations were clearly targeting brown people.
“I was always more than uncomfortable and rattled and furious about that. I saw its resonance when I got older with race and the policing of Black youth,” she said. “So, I’ve dedicated my career, in some ways, to untangling questions I had as a kid around race and immigration control.”
Tso got her start mapping the lack of access to healthy and affordable food in the Navajo Nation. “I saw maps as a colonial tool that’s been used to seize land, and I wanted to take it back and use it as a tool of empowerment,” she said. “Maps are ultimately about world building. Maps create a reality just as much as they reflect it.
“It’s incredibly powerful in terms of building a counternarrative around the stories that we tell about immigration and immigration enforcement.”
The researchers plan to continue to update the Mapping Deportations Project long into the future. For now, though, it is stalled at 2022 because current deportation data is not available. “That 100 percent has to do with the current administration,” Hernández said. “They haven’t released the new data.”
Meanwhile, they are looking for other ways to gather it, including Freedom of Information Act requests and working with UCLA’s Data Deportation Project to cross-check numbers and resolve any discrepancies.
The final map in the Mapping Deportations Project sequence comes in the form of a butterfly. The image is animated in reverse, featuring the same data that is used in the first map.
But it imagines a future where migration is not a crime, where belonging is not dictated by race or birthplace, and where mass displacement is not the norm.
