A new online site titled “Mapping Deportations,” which was publicly launched Wednesday, exposes the relationship between racism, discrimination, and immigration enforcement in the United States and greatly expands coverage of deportations in U.S. history, from the earliest recorded history to the present day.

The Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA School of Law and Million Dollar Hoods partnered to create “Mapping Deportations,” an unprecedented website and organizing tool that tracks every deportation order in the U.S. since 1895, when the federal government began keeping such information.

The data shows that 96 percent of all deportations have been to countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, according to a UCLA press release.

The ambitious project, now available online, is actually a data hub that includes a detailed timeline dating back to 1790 and uses maps, data, and timelines to show how immigration laws, and deportation policy in particular, have shaped the racial makeup of the country since its founding—a phenomenon that is ongoing today.

The website allows one to view the history of immigration enforcement in the United States not as a series of unconnected events, but as a pattern.

For more than two centuries, immigration laws in the United States have favored Europeans and their descendants, while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion, expulsion, and punishment.

While U.S. immigration laws and policies have changed over time, the country's immigration enforcement regime has consistently resulted in the targeting and punishing of non-white immigrants, as the cited data demonstrate.

You can click here to visit the Mapping Deportations website.

The data center tracks key pieces of legislation and court cases that show the interconnectedness of the slave trade, Indigenous exclusion and removal, and the motivations rooted in white supremacy that shaped modern U.S. immigration control and enforcement.

Researchers mapped all eight million deportation orders the U.S. issued between 2022 and 1895, the time range for which the oldest and most recent data was available.

And they showed how the foundations of current U.S. government immigration policy and the assault on the country's migrant communities are the latest outcome in a long history of racist immigration enforcement.

“We created this project to create an interdisciplinary approach that explores the country's history of exclusion, deportation, and punishment. Through our work, we center research expertise of scholars guided by a broad understanding of what the 8 million removal orders issued since 1895 say about who belongs, who has been systematically removed, and what that means in today's immigration climate,” said Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the Thomas E. Lifka Chair in History at UCLA and founding director of the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative.

The website took five years to complete and is a collaboration between Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Mariah Tso, a GIS specialist at the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Million Dollar Hoods Project, and Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, faculty co-director of CILP and professor of practice at the UCLA School of Law.

“As our project demonstrates, immigration laws, policies, and judicial precedents have changed over time, but their effect on immigration enforcement has remained remarkably constant: non-white, non-European immigrants have suffered far more exclusion and deportation than others. By illustrating that story, this website opens a space for all of us to start thinking about how to build something better,” Arulanantham said.