The crackdown on immigration is not a phenomenon that began with the MAGA movement. A new project tracing every deportation order back to 1895 reveals that today’s U.S. immigration system originated in the antebellum period, with racial policies shaping enforcement.
Mapping Deportations, a digital project by three scholars at UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CLIP) and the incarceration data initiative Million Dollar Hoods, is the most extensive collection of deportation data in the U.S to date.
The website features a dynamic visualization of interactive timelines, charts and graphics that show the development of immigration enforcement from 1895 to 2022. The map displays the more than 8 million deportation orders in American history, with the site revealing a troubling trend: the origins of U.S. immigration control has and continues to be racialized removals.
“Over 96% of deportation orders have been issued to people from predominantly non-white countries, and this isn’t random. It’s a reflection of policies steeped in racism,” said Mariah Tso, G.I.S. Specialist at Million Dollar Hoods.
Speaking at a briefing held by American Community Media on Sept. 19, the team at Mapping Deportations outlined a timeline of immigration enforcement, showing that while the type of policy tools used have changed, the same underlying priorities remain.
“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. It has yet to be fully purged, and in fact has been reinvented in some ways since 1965,” Mapping Deportations co-director and UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez said.
The roots of U.S. immigration control date back to the period of slavery, when deep racial divisions marked migration control as a “tool of racial exclusion and subordination,” according to the site. The period from 1790-1876 included the expulsion of Native nations and the passage of laws such as the 1790 Naturalization Act, which restricted the right to naturalization to any “free white person.” The Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 sparked fear among southern states who viewed Black emancipation as a “moral contagion” that they felt shouldn’t be brought to the U.S., Hernandez said.
She said processes like enslavement, removal, Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration illustrate how white supremacist ideology drove immigration policy. Mapping Deportations uses existing data to trace the connections between historical immigration enforcement and what is being seen today, showing that established themes and sentiments are continuing today.
“The U.S. immigration system really was created to establish and to sustain the United States as a white man’s republic,” Hernandez said. The project features quote maps that highlight immigration-centered political messages throughout history, revealing how immigration laws were never passed to merely manage borders but to maintain a racial hierarchy. Through these visualizations, the site examines the role of white nationalists’ rhetoric in shaping U.S. immigration policy.
Ahilan Arulanantham, Mapping Deportations co-creator and faculty co-director at CLIP, said these quotes, many from President Donald Trump, illustrate how anti-immigrant rhetoric transcends centuries and has similar ideological foundations through time. Generalizing based on negative group stereotypes, a common feature in immigration messages, is a “classic example of racism,” he said, calling for more accurate historical accounts to help break the cycle of racially motivated immigration policies.
“This idea that the blood of our country will be poisoned by morally deficient and contagious people, riff-raff and scum from other countries, is an idea that is all over the 1920s in immigration policy,” Arulanantham said. “Well, in 2023, President Trump started repeating this lie that Venezuela had emptied its prisons and mental health institutions to send those people into the United States…We also connected it to a later lie that Haitians were eating people’s dogs and cats, both of which are debunked.”
Considering this historical data, Hernandez said the policy pursued by the Trump administration is not a revolutionary development but rather an extension of a previous existing system.
“For me, as a historian, what is happening now is simply an escalation of a system that’s already been pre-built and in place,” she said. “There’s nothing phenomenally new to all of this. He hasn’t invented much. He is pulling the levers that were already built.”
As the executive branch takes an increasingly active role in shaping the scope and direction of immigration enforcement, the Supreme Court has been less willing to set guardrails on those policies. Just last month, the Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue immigration operations in Los Angeles, permitting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to continue using race as a factor in enforcement.
According to a senior Homeland Security official, ICE has deported nearly 200,000 people in the first seven months of Trump’s administration. This data puts ICE on track for the highest rate of deportations in at least a decade, as concerns mount over racial and ethnic profiling in how potential detainees are targeted. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported that 69% of those arrested during the city’s crackdown from June 1 to June 10 have no criminal convictions.
“There’s obvious racial discrimination, even now, that’s driving who gets to come in and also who gets deported, and that was even before we had the white South African refugee program, which allowed them to jump the line over so many refugees from other countries,” Arulanantham said.
With deportations deeply entrenched in America’s past, Mapping Deportations aimed to capture these statistics in ways that reveal both a story and pattern. By linking numbers and data to political narratives, the project allowed the team to illustrate the types of motivations driving immigration laws.
“I knew as a historian that there had been more than 50 million deportation orders in U.S. 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,” Hernandez said. “…[Mapping Deportations] tries to provide the world in which this data is being created.”
As the team drew on the racial history of immigration enforcement, the continuity between earlier discriminatory policies and current political actions led them to question whether the U.S. political system still operates in a “white man’s republic.”
“The concept of the whites-only immigration policy isn’t whether or not we are or ever have been a white nation. It’s about the rules that are put into place to subordinate non-white groups that are within the country,” Hernandez said. “… The country will never be a white nation by demographics. But the question is, are we still a white man’s republic by its political infrastructure? That we can have a conversation about.”
