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Who gets deported?
Does the US primarily target people from non-white countries for deportations? According to a report from the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy and the Million Dollar Hoods, they do. From analyses of over 8 million deportation orders from 1895 to 2022, researchers have created detailed visualizations revealing that over 96% of orders were issued to people from non-white countries.
At a September 19 briefing hosted by American Community Media, the experts behind Mapping Deportations shared insights into the interactive maps and visualizations that trace deportation policies back to 1895, uncovering patterns of racially biased deportation that explain where we are today, and why.
The panelists included Kelly Lytle Hernández, Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA, founding director of Million Dollar Hoods; Mariah Tso, G.I.S. Specialist, Million Dollar Hoods at UCLA, and Ahilan Arulanantham, Faculty Co-Director, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law.
The interactive maps enable users to explore the data by year and region, as well as by categories such as race, country, and enforcement tactics. The visualizations include context-rich quotes from lawmakers, highlighting the racial and ideological biases underlying immigration policies. Interactive elements like the racing bar chart and log-scale transformations help make complex data more accessible and comprehensible. The website connects historical deportation data to current immigration policies, helping users understand the long-term systemic patterns of racial discrimination.
Mapping forced deportations
The website has its roots in the three forced migrations that made modern America by unpeopling the country through the expulsion of Native nations, the transatlantic slave trade, and, more recently, mass deportation, said Kelly Lytle Hernández. She explained that maps and visualizations existed about the removal of Native nations through wars and treaties in the 19th century, and the forcible kidnapping of more than 12 million Africans to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, but there were none about mass deportation.
“I knew, as a historian, that there had been more than 50 million deportation orders in US 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.”
The aim of the website, said Ahilan Arulanantham, was to develop “an educational tool that would illustrate in a more honest way, a lot of the history of immigration law and policy,” and “tell a rich, contextual story that has not been told.”
In collaboration with lead cartographer Mariah Tso of Million Dollar Hoods, which charts the fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration, the researchers mapped the patterns of every single deportation order from 1895 to 2022. The pattern over the last 127 years, said Tso, is that over 96% of deportation orders have targeted predominantly non-white countries, “ a reflection of policies steeped in racism, and the quotes of lawmakers and leaders.”
The visualizations were built with publicly available data from federal authorities that map immigration statistics, featuring deportation order data by country or region, with each dot representing deportation orders reflecting the event rather than an individual.
“So, the larger the dot, the larger the number of deportation orders,” added Tso. “Prior to 1934, authorities used race or people. After that, it was country of nationality, and every once in a while, country of destination.” Not surprisingly, Mexico has led with the highest number of deportation orders continuously since 1916.
Race discrimination
Ahilan Arulanantham, who has spent a 25-year career challenging the federal government’s immigration policies on behalf of immigrants and immigrants’ rights organizations, said he was struck by “how stark some of the race discrimination was in immigration policy, even during the Biden administration.”
For example, the Title 42 program excluding people from the US based on Covid was applied very harshly to Haitians, Afghans, and Central Americans, while virtually all Ukrainians were exempt from the program, allowing almost half a million to enter; more recently, the South African refugee program allowed white South Africans “to jump the line over so many refugees from other countries.”
“There’s obvious racial discrimination even now that’s driving who gets to come in and also who gets deported,” said Arulanantham, reflected in lawmaker quotes from different time periods. He referred to Donald J. Trump’s 2018 rejection of a bipartisan proposal to give lawful permanent residence to Haitians, Salvadorans, and people from Sudan, Honduras, and Nicaragua on temporary protected status, with the now infamous quote,” Why are we having people from shithole countries coming here?”
Arulanantham pointed out that the racist origins of so many immigration laws and policies that remain in effect today have their roots in a law motivated by racial discrimination that was passed in 1929 at the height of the eugenic movement.
A historical bias
The website examines historical summaries of deportation data against a timeline organized into five major eras, creating a picture of the laws enforced, the communities targeted, and enforcement priorities as they changed. According to Hernández, evidence showed that between 1790 to 1875, the period of slavery before the Civil War, the US immigration system was created “to establish and to sustain the United States as a white man’s Republic,” based on the expulsion of Native nations and the 1803 Immigration Act, targeting free black migrants for exclusion from slave states. “Southern slavers talked about black emancipation as a moral contagion,” they did not want in the United States, added Hernández.
From 1876 to 1929, the federal government took control of the immigration system to push for a whites-only immigration regime by excluding, punishing, and deporting non-white immigrants, partly by barring Asian immigration to the US, blocking most free black migration into the United States, and criminalizing Mexican immigrants entering the country.
However, black and non-white immigration continued for ”subordinated positions,” explained Hernández, such as janitors, nannies, laundresses, and landscapers, reinforcing racialized power rooted in the “rules and the rituals of white supremacy.”
Racism is baked into the immigration system
During the Cold War, Congress continued to consolidate and carry forward the whites-only immigration system. “Following the 1965 Immigration Act, Congress adopted more laws and Supreme Court passed new rulings that legitimated racism in the immigration system,” said Hernández, referring to the 1975 Brignoni-Ponce decision which legitimized the use of race as a factor of immigration law enforcement – a ruling that has allowed ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to continue using race as a factor in their recent operations.
From 1991 to the present, the United States federal government has conducted more than 7 million deportations and issued more than 25 million so-called voluntary departure orders, building what Hernández calls “the largest immigrant detention and deportation system in the world.”
The escalation of US immigration today, warned Arulanantham, is a dangerous throwback to the 1920s when people said the same things they are saying now, “this idea that the blood of our country will be poisoned by morally contagious and deficient people, riff raff and scum from other countries”.
Racist sentiments are reflected, for example, in Trump’s claim that Haitians were eating their neighbor’s dogs and cats, and his repetition of unfounded rumors that Venezuela had emptied its prisons and mental health institutions to send those people into the United States – it was the explanation given on national TV by DHS Secretary Kristy Noem, for ending the TPS program.
“Racism was baked into the immigration system over time, dating all the way back to the antebellum period, and is yet to be fully purged, and, in fact, has been reinvented in some ways since 1965,” said Hernández.
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