When UCLA historian Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández described mass deportation as “the third forced migration that made modern America,” she reframed how we understand the country’s history. Alongside her colleagues Mariah Tso and Ahilan Arulanantham, she revealed a hard truth that still shapes immigration debates today. Deportation in the United States has never been only about enforcing the law. It has always reflected deep racial and political priorities that date back more than a century.
The Roots of Exclusion
The story begins in the early 1800s when Congress passed the first federal immigration restrictions. These laws did not target criminals or security threats. They targeted people based on race. In 1803, one of the earliest immigration bans specifically prohibited free Black migrants from entering slave states. Lawmakers feared that the presence of free Blacks, particularly Haitians after the Haitian Revolution, would inspire rebellion among enslaved people. From the very beginning, immigration law was used to protect racial hierarchies rather than simply to regulate movement.
Throughout the nineteenth century, as the nation expanded westward, policies continued to favor white settlers. Indigenous nations were forcibly removed from their lands, and Chinese and other Asian immigrants faced exclusion through a series of federal acts. By the turn of the twentieth century, the framework of a “white man’s republic” was already in place. This system determined who could enter, who could stay, and who would be forced to leave.
Mapping a Century of Deportations
The Mapping Deportations project vividly visualizes this history. It documents every known deportation order from 1895 to 2022. The map’s moving dots show waves of removal across time and geography, revealing that more than ninety percent of deportation orders have targeted people from predominantly non-white countries.
For Mariah Tso, who designed the interactive map, the project was about making the invisible visible. Each dot tells part of a larger pattern, a living record of who the United States has chosen to exclude. Her work combines history, geography, and technology to demonstrate that these removals were not random events, but rather part of a system shaped by bias and reinforced by policy.
A System Built to Exclude
As the decades passed, Congress formalized what Dr. Hernández calls the “white-only immigration regime.” After the Civil War, white nationalists pushed for laws that would limit the arrival and settlement of non-white people. By 1929, Congress had banned nearly all Asian immigration, restricted Black migration, and criminalized Mexican workers who crossed the border to fill the country’s growing demand for labor.
These laws did not completely close America to the world. Instead, they controlled access by race and class. Non-white workers were allowed to enter through back doors and side gates, often to perform labor deemed undesirable by others. They were needed but never fully welcomed. As Hernández explains, the immigration system became less about the separation of races and more about the management of racial hierarchy.
From Civil Rights to Mass Deportation
Many Americans assume the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought an end to racism in immigration law. In truth, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act only abolished explicit racial quotas. Discriminatory practices quietly continued. Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s and later decades upheld the use of race as a factor in immigration enforcement. Federal agencies, such as the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have established robust networks that connect immigration policy with criminal law.
By the early 1990s, the United States had created the largest immigration detention and deportation system in the world. In the years that followed, millions were deported or forced to leave through so-called “voluntary departures.” The same structural bias that once shaped early laws continues to operate through modern enforcement tools, such as Title 42 expulsions and expedited removals.
The Human Cost
For Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, a civil rights attorney and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, the story is not only historical; it is also profoundly personal. He has spent much of his career litigating against the racial and religious discrimination still embedded in immigration policy. He points out that the effects remain constant even when laws change. Whether during the Trump administration or under more recent leadership, deportations have continued to fall disproportionately on non-white and poorer immigrants.
The contrast between how Haitian and Central American migrants are treated compared with Ukrainians fleeing war highlights that racial bias remains alive in practice. As Arulanantham notes, “The laws may shift every few years, but the outcomes are remarkably consistent.”
Seeing the Pattern, Changing the Future
The project’s final visualization reverses the map’s timeline, showing deportations moving backward through history. It is a symbolic gesture, an imagined undoing of the patterns that shaped American immigration control. The team calls it a “map for the future,” dedicated to everyone who continues to fight for immigrant rights and for an honest telling of the nation’s past.
Together, the work of these scholars offers more than data. It invites reflection. It asks whether America’s deportation system is broken, or whether it functions precisely as it was designed to. For communities across the country, especially those who live in fear of raids or separation, the answer is not academic. It is a lived reality.
The story of deportation in America is therefore not only a matter of policy but of conscience. It is about how a nation built on the idea of liberty continues to decide who belongs and who does not. And as the Mapping Deportations team reminds us, understanding that history is the first step toward ensuring that the next chapter tells a different story.