Mapping deportations: UCLA team connects a century of immigration bias to the present

UCLA Mapping Project

At a recent national briefing titled, “A History of Bias: Who Gets Deported in the United States?,” three UCLA researchers presented data, stretching back more than a century, which showed that the U.S.’ immigration policies in the 1890’s still determine which immigrants get to stay in the U.S. today.

The project, called Mapping Deportations, is the result of five years of combing through immigration records going back to 1895. The UCLA researchers turned all of the data they collected into interactive maps and timelines that make one thing crystal clear:  Deportation in the U.S. always followed a particular racial pattern that became an integral part of this country’s immigration law that is designed to deport people of color.

The researchers presented their fact-finding project to at a press briefing this past September that was sponsored by American Community Media.

“There have been over 50 million deportation orders in U.S. history” said Kelly Lytle Hernandez, historian and founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods Project. “But there’s never been a single map showing how those removals unfolded over time.  We built what was missing," she said.

One of the sites' amazing features is a time-lapse map that plots every deportation order from 1895-2022.  The trend jumps out immediately.  Over 96% of all deportation orders were issued to people from nonwhite countries.  That number hasn’t budged in over 100 years.

“Thats not a coincidence, its policy,” said Mariah Tao, a G.I.S. specialist with the Millon Dollar Hoods .

Tao’s slideshow drove the point home, pairing deportation data with the words of the people who endorsed racist policies.

For example, in 1916, Senator Thomas W. Hardwick said, “The wise policy would be to admit Caucasian immigrants only.”

A decade later, eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin warned, “Deportation is the last line of defense… If we do not deport the undesirable individual, we cannot get rid of his blood.”

And in 2023, former President Donald Trump, in referring to immigrants, told supporters, “They are poisoning the blood of our country.”

“The language changes a little,” Tao said, “but the fear behind it doesn’t.” She continued, “These quotes show how the same fear-based language — about blood, purity and belonging — repeats across generations. It’s not coincidence. It’s continuity.”

Five Eras of Immigration Enforcement

To make sense of the data, the team divided U.S. immigration history into 5 eras:

●      1790-1875 Roots of control. Early laws targeted free black immigrants and at the same time Native nations were being pushed off their land. Free black migrants were harshly scrutinized in the south because they gave inspiration to slaves.  They were often kidnapped back into slavery, deported back to the north or worse lynched.

●      1876-1929 Whites Only Immigration Regime. Congress shut out most Asian migrants and began criminalizing Mexican border crossing.

●      1930-1954 Consolidate and Carry Forward.  This era is highlighted by the mass deportation of people of Mexican descent to the tune of nearly 2 million people. The same system persisted through the Great Depression and War.

●      1955-1990 Amend and Enforce.  The 1965 Immigration Act ended racial quotas on paper but the Supreme Court’s Brignoni-Ponce case ruling in 1975 allowed race to be considered in immigration enforcement.

●      1991-Present. Deportation Nation.  The U.S. built the world’s largest detention system, carrying out more than 7 million deportations at this time.

“People like to believe 1965 erased racism from immigration law,” Hernández said. “It didn’t. It just rebranded it…. So, these are the five eras that we talk about in general and in some what we’re trying to show is how 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.

The Same Laws - Still Working

Though the website covers more than a century of history, the team stressed that many of the same laws are still in use. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975), the Supreme Court ruled that Border Patrol agents could consider race when making stops. That decision has never been overturned. And just a few weeks before this briefing, the current Court upheld that logic, letting ICE and Border Patrol continue using race as a factor in operations across the western states.

Ahilan Arulanantham, a longtime immigration lawyer and co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, said,. “The Court is still validating what we’re showing on the map,. Race still decides who gets stopped, detained and deported.”

“Even when the laws are rewritten, the power dynamics don’t really change. The structure stays the same” Hernandez added.

Different Rules -  Same Results

Arulanantham said the laws keep shifting but the pattern doesn’t. “The language evolves, the numbers rise and fall, but it’s always the same groups paying the price,” he said.

He pointed out Title 42 and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as modern examples. “Haitians and Central Americans were blocked or deported, while Ukrainians were waved through. That’s not coincidence — that’s baked into the system.”

He also mentioned the Registry Act of 1929, a law that granted legal status to many European immigrants who had overstayed their visas. “If that law were updated today,” he said, “millions of Mexican and Central American workers who’ve lived here for decades could become citizens overnight. That’s exactly why it hasn’t been updated.”

Connecting the Past to the Present

When asked if there is a difference between the mass deportations during the Trump administration and those of previous administrations, Hernandez responded, “I would say that for me as a historian, what is happening now is simply an escalation. What was a system that's already been pre built and in place? There's nothing phenomenally new to all of this. He hasn't invented much. He is, you know, pulling the levers that were already built.”

“Is the system broken or is it working exactly the way it was designed?”

For many it might be easy to conclude that all of the data accumulated by Hernández, Tao and Arulanantham seems to show that the immigration system is functioning the way it was designed to function.    

To see the website, which has visualizations, bar charts, maps, quotes, a video and timelines, go to https://mappingdeportations.com/

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