The Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA School of Law has collaborated to create a website and organizing tool that traces every deportation order by the federal government since 1895.

An announcement of its launch describes how the project, “Mapping Deportations,” shows that “the immigration laws, and particularly deportation policy, have engineered the racial make-up of the country since its founding — a phenomenon that is taking place in plain sight today.”

The website is a partnership between CILP and the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative at UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. It took five years to complete under the leadership of UCLA professor and Million Dollar Hoods founder Kelly Lytle Hernández, Mariah Tso of the Bunche Center, and CILP faculty co-director Ahilan Arulanantham. Notably, Arulanantham and Hernández both previously won MacArthur “Genius” Grants.

Arulanantham is a professor from practice and former longtime lawyer at the ACLU of Southern California, where he was senior counsel. In recent months, he has been a leading courtroom advocate opposing federal immigration actions.

“As our project shows, the immigration laws, policies, and court precedents have shifted over time, but their effect on immigration enforcement has remained remarkably consistent: non-white, non-European immigrants have faced far more exclusion and deportation than others,” Arulanantham says. “By illustrating that history, this website helps open space for all of us to start thinking about how we build something better.”

Through the website, journalists, educators, and others can explore and make better sense of current immigration enforcement policy. It includes a detailed timeline dating back to 1790 and traces key pieces of legislation and court cases that show the interconnectedness of the slave trade, Indigenous exclusion, and removal, and motivations that shaped modern immigration control and enforcement in the United States.

“We created this project to create an interdisciplinary approach to explore the country’s history of exclusion, deportation, and punishment,” says Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UCLA. “Through our work, we center the research expertise of academics guided by a broad understanding of what the 8 million deportation orders issued since 1895 say about who belongs, who has systemically been pushed out, and what that means in today’s immigration climate.”

The project is the latest initiative of CILP, which was founded in 2020 to expand the law school's role as a national leader in immigration law and policy. It generates innovative ideas at the intersection of immigration scholarship, and it serves as a hub for transforming those ideas into meaningful changes in immigration policy.

Read more about the project in the “On Politics” newsletter of The New York Times.