Los Angeles – The Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law and Million Dollar Hoods have partnered to create Mapping Deportations, an unprecedented website and organizing tool that traces every deportation order in the U.S. since 1895.

Mapping Deportations reveals, through never-before-seen mapping, how systemic racism has defined who gets to stay and who must go. The data shows that 96% of all deportations have been to countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. In short, Mapping Deportations illustrates how 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.

“We created this project to create an interdisciplinary approach to explore the country’s history of exclusion, deportation, and punishment. 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,” said Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UCLA and is founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative.

The website took five years to complete and is a collaboration between Hernández, Mariah Tso, GIS Specialist for the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Million Dollar Hoods Project, and Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, CILP Faculty Co-Director and Professor from Practice at UCLA School of Law.

“The history of immigration enforcement in the United States is not a series of disconnected events; it is an intricate pattern of exclusion and removal, fueled by racism. The maps and visualizations on the website, unmask those persistent patterns of exclusion, removal and punishment that continually target nonwhite migrants. Every day, the U.S. government continues to use the systems that were created long ago to exclude and divide,” Tso said. 

The data hub includes a detailed timeline dating back to 1790. It traces key pieces of legislation and court cases that show the interconnectedness of the slave trade, Indigenous exclusion, and removal, and motivations rooted in white supremacy that shaped modern immigration control and enforcement in the United States.

“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. By illustrating that history, this website helps open space for all of us to start thinking about how we build something better,” said Arulanantham.

Through the website, journalists, educators, and anyone curious about immigration history and present immigration policy can explore and make better sense of current immigration enforcement policy.

Learn more about Mapping Deportations by visiting the website. Read The New York Times story.

About UCLA CILP:

Founded in 2020, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at the UCLA School of Law expands the law school's role as a national leader in immigration law and policy, generating innovative ideas at the intersection of immigration scholarship and practice and serving as a hub for transforming those ideas into meaningful changes in immigration policy. 

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