How U.S. Immigration Enforcement Targets Nonwhite Migrants

Mapping deportations invites you to see the history of U.S. immigration enforcement not as a series of disconnected events, but as a pattern. For more than two centuries, U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion, removal, and punishment. Although U.S. immigration law and policy have shifted over time, the nation’s immigration enforcement regime has consistently produced this result.

Maps & Data

Connect the Dots

Explore our timeline and data visualizations to learn more.

Who Gets Deported?

8 Million Deportations, 96% to Nonwhite-Majority Countries

Our feature map utilizes publicly-available data to map the total number of deportation orders annually issued by federal immigration authorities. The size of each moving dot corresponds to the number of deportation orders by region for each year. Note that because Mexico and Central America had such a large share of all deportation orders, a scale transformation (see our Data Methodology on our Sources page) was needed to keep the overall map itself viewable.

Although the moving dots on the map are grouped into ten broad regions, the racing bar chart featured on the left side of the map provides a snapshot of the top five groupings for deportation orders. Over time, federal immigration authorities have used different criteria to classify people. Today, they use nationality or country of origin, but previously they used race, country of destination, and other criteria to report deportation statistics. The terms we have used on the barchart reflect the labels used by federal authorities for each fiscal year. If you are interested in exploring each year in more detail, please see our interactive bubble chart Deportations by Year: 1895–2022

Mapping 127 years of deportation orders comes with a variety of other challenges. In particular, federal immigration authorities regularly changed the terminology, classifications, policies, and data management practices pertaining to the forced removal of noncitizens from the country. To learn more about how we made sense of the data and the choices we made to interpret it, please see our Data Methodology documentation in Sources.

Deportations by Year

A Detailed Breakdown of Deportation Orders by Year

Deportation data is complex. Although our feature map, Who Gets Deported?: 1895–2022, depicts deportation orders as tied to ten geographic regions, such aggregations can come with their own set of harms (see Hidden Data: Mexico and Central America). 

These broad regional categorizations can erase the specific circumstances and experiences of different migrant communities, particularly with regard to the root causes of migration. Racializations can shift over time, including who (and which countries of origin) are racialized as white.