Who Gets Deported?

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.