OpenICE: Open-Source US Immigration Detention Dashboard
openice.org
openice.org
You could collect oral accounts and invite people to submit them.
From the grapevine (and this makes sense because they're pushing into new numerical territory, and also don't care at all) the conditions are very crowded / harsh. You could also include accounts from family members about the kafkaesque absence of information, e.g. It's good to make the point that almost every number in this chart is a human, and a family and circle of friends, who harmed no one and is being severely harmed.
As a non-expert who cares about this issue, the "criminal/other" split is very clear and was the first thing I looked for.
This is very counter to the administration narrative that our country is teeming with foreign gang members, and it is presented in a chill, non-shrill, high credibility way. That's very helpful!
Some more explanation or breakdown on what types of "other" violations dominate (e.g. are these all just overstays?) might be nice, but the point is still well made. I would also like to see what percentage were felony charges/convictions if there's a significant percentage of misdemeanors.
I expect with the recent ICE funding boost and the hiring spree they're about to go on, the "criminal"/"other" ratio going to plummet as ICE climbs the s-curve. It will be very useful to have a live measure of that as it happens.
One meta point: I'm always shocked at how rare it is, for issues that are current and important in the public discourse, that someone makes a technically and visually competent, single-purpose website contributing to the debate. I have seen them to be extremely valuable on campaigns I've worked on, such as the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA site-blocking bills in 2011/2012, but it's so rare anyone makes one. Thank you for creating an exception to a generally disappointing rule!
Also loans forgiven would be nice to see since ICE signups now get a $10K reduction. Not a large number but more to make a point.
This also underplays the current cruelty of the US system, far out of proportion with any proper policing of immigration (which obviously reasonable people can argue about). So, I don't think you're wrong exactly, and you can play the victim if you want ("I know I will be downvoted", sad violin).
ICE alleges these people have violated the civil code so calling them "violators" assumes guilt and comes across as inflammatory. Something like like "No Criminal Status" would be accurate and more neutral.
Personally, I'd call them "Productive Members of Society The Rest of Us Depend On."
Like it or not, this data is highly political. You can’t correctly interpret it in a vacuum.
This is only useful for in-group messaging.
Number of children separated from Families.
Number of US citizens illegally detained.
Number of lawsuits against ICE.
Cost of ICE vs each Detainee.
I am so tired of this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Can we please remember that the people who are being deported did, in fact, break the law? While I have empathy for people who want nothing more than to be productive citizens in the USA, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you did it the wrong way, you're subject to deportation. That's just how it goes. More than anything, I'm profoundly embarrassed that our politicians have allowed the situation to get this bad.
While I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using, do not support using immigration for weaponizing speech, and certainly wish we had a saner system of immigration, characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
I have friends who have been waiting for years to get a green card, in large part because of the consequences of years of our de facto open border situation, which have jammed the courts with "refugees" who knew that it was easier to enter the country and claim asylum than wait in line for legal immigration channels.
Edit: I have been respectful and polite in this comment, but it has now been flagged down twice (EDIT: three times). Those of you who abuse the flagging system to censor speech you do not like should be ashamed of yourselves.
His is not the only case, but is certainly a very obvious one - and that is what people are reacting too. Along with the rhetoric from the current administration that makes it plainly obvious that actual illegal behavior is neither required, not even necessarily desired, to deport someone.
Like Trump’s threats against Rosie O’Donnell for what should be straightforward protected political speech. [https://time.com/7301997/trump-threat-us-citizenship-revoke-...]
The very public behavior and words of the current administration is extremely unhinged on this topic, and appears to have nothing to do with actual purposes you’re claiming it does.
I provided two high profile and clear examples where that is either 1) unlikely, or 2) definitely not the case, and actually absurd in context, because she is a born US citizen, and the threats the US President is leveling at her are clearly not even close to legal.
Which you continue to ignore. And which even appear to be headline examples the administration is not only creating, but persisting in making very public.
In that context, how can anyone reasonably assume that the other, less high profile, cases are being done ‘correctly’?
Even in the Garcia case, there's no dispute that the man is/was here illegally. Everything revolves around a secondary debate regarding the temporary suspension of deportation.
“He gained legal permission to remain in the United States and established a life here. But in March of 2025, Mr. Abrego Garcia would find himself unlawfully deported and detained in a Salvadoran prison with the very gang members he had fled.” [https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/]
A Immigration Judge had reviewed his situation and given him protected status. Which the Trump admin willfully ignored.
I’m not focusing on a specific example to hide the truth - I’m focusing on a clear, very public, example where the Trump admin itself is making a clear example that they’ll do everything in their (significant) power to do exactly what you are saying they won’t be doing.
And which you keep refusing to acknowledge.
"Mr Abrego Garcia has acknowledged entering the US illegally in 2012, according to court documents" [1]
He was currently here legally, only in the sense that a court had previously suspended his deportation.
And notably, the reason the gov’t has been giving for doing that deportation appears to not be the original illegal immigration offense you seem to think it is - but an apparently purely fictitious claim that he was in MS-13 (including a doctored photo of tattoos presented by Trump).
So to repeat, it seems quite obvious that ICE didn’t deport him because he was here illegally in the past (a Judge had prevented that previously), that he was here legally when he was deported (on a Immigration Judge’s orders even), and that the evidence presented as to why he was a member of MS-13 was clearly faked - but still presented as the truth by the President himself to the public. Ala ‘Iraq WMD’.
And the second example is the President threatening to make a born and raised US citizen stateless and ‘deport them’, which is also blatantly illegal eh? Constitutionally, that isn’t even supposed to be a thing.
The LACK of concern here is what appears to be unjustified. Are there probably completely normal and legally justified deportations still going on? I certainly hope so! But the concern here is that the President (ICE’s boss) is sending a very clear message that it is not only not required, but apparently undesirable, that these deportations be legal.
I wish we had kept up Obamas numbers instead of slacking between here and then.
Respectfully and politely: you are completely failing to appreciate or acknowledge the situation, and doing so helps enable the abuses that are taking place. To give a parallel example, you'd get a comparable response if you said "police only kill criminals, with a few high-profile cause celebrè exceptions; people should just stop breaking the law".
Americans are overall extremely happy to transact with, socialize with, be neighbors with, have children with, and educate the children of undocumented immigrants. This strong expression of what we really want (in our actual decisions) creates a powerful incentive pulling people here. Put differently, if a majority of Americans hated undocumented immigrants, impeded them at every turn, and boycotted their labor and the services of businesses that hired them, the number of people who come here would be very different.
In an analogy to tech policy, when you ask the average voter "should people have access to private communication tools that are private even against legitimate warrants under the rule of law, even in cases of serious crimes or terrorism" everyone says "no!" But if you ask them, would you like an app where your own messages are private, many people choose that app, and many engineers and major publicly traded companies choose to build such apps.
We explicitly run a society that uses multiple dueling measures of what people want, the main ones being the will of voters and peoples' choices in the marketplace. Immigration is one place where those two measures collide, and here we are.
As a result, I think it's insufficient to simply point to the law. Maybe the laws are wrong. If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws. This is an important principle in freedom-based societies.
> If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws.
Maybe the laws are wrong -- and I disagree with many! -- but street protests and loud people on social media are not sufficient proof that we should abandon enforcement. Consider, for example, that you might be surrounded by a bubble of opinion that matches your own, while ignoring the opinion of a larger group of people who disagree with you. Or (similar to my own case), there are a large number of people who disagree who simply keep quiet, most of the time, because they don't want to be insulted, or worse.
If you don't like the laws, you can try to elect people who will change them, influence their behavior via legal speech, etc. But if your favored people don't get elected, or they otherwise ignore you, that's tough beans. We live in a republic.
I can virtually guarantee that it will be flagged down again once I stop paying attention.
Edit: sure enough, the comment was flagged down again.
Heck, even Trump wanted to make farm and hotel workers exempt until there was too much blow back.
Every other country enforces its immigration laws. There’s no good reason that we shouldn’t.
Once the Government can start ignore the Constitution it is meaningless and there us no more USA.
We are ALL bound to it or no one is!
Also tired of this rhetoric. Due process is the process that is due, nothing more. It has been -- will can continue be -- redefined by the government to execute laws.
Again, I don't support everything the current administration is doing, nor do I assert that everything they are doing is legal. But that will ultimately be decided by the due process of law, which is what the term means.
Given that there are a great many trials underway concerning these questions, I am not concerned that the due process of law has disappeared.
Setting aside the other aspects, this misses the point, in my opinion. The irredeemable part is their pride and glee in the unfortunate effects of their “enforcing our immigration laws.” Joking about alligators getting detainees, filming in their Salvadoran gulag, the “deportation ASMR” video, etc. If they were decent people who were “only” enforcing the laws, they would at least do it quietly without all the cruel grandstanding for their fans.
IMO this is a flawed application for immigration policy because it can cause some people who go the "right way" years to get through the system with one or two minor mishaps meaning you jeopardize your chance of becoming a citizen. It really shouldn't be that hard to become a citizen of this country. Immigration reform has been long discussed as the only solution to this problem, but Republican lawmakers have decided this is too good of a wedge issue to ever fully fix the problem.
So, yes, while I agree with you on the surface, where I disagree with you and this argument is that it papers over the extremely hostile, dated and ineffective policy that has largely been the source of problems for Immigration for decades that lawmakers don't seem to want to solve because it benefits their campaigns.
Applying for asylum IS a legal immigration channel.
Maybe you should look in the mirror about who should be ashamed of themselves
In case you were wondering, this is a large part of why it takes years to get a review for something like a green card application.
Why don't you move to Somalia. Good people will respect the most basic laws of a country to uphold a humane standard of living for those that deserve it.
Did it ever come to your mind that throwing around terms like candy actually makes you a defender of the things they cover, like fascism, as you contribute the concepts themselves indistinguishable? Maybe it did and you're doing it on purpose eh?
I’m assuming the creators of this site are attempting to make an economic argument for how Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad that the detentions are because it has “$1.49 billion” economic impact which is “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue”. But it is really a rather abusive perspective that ignores the inverse, because the inverse is that it is “$1.49 billion” that Americans are not earning and the “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue” would not have been lost if it had been Americans doing the work.
Arguably, the case could also even be made that the tax revenue would have been higher because Americans would have been paid higher wages simply due to the increased effects of the supply decline and demand that would increase wages/salaries.
Additionally, arguably, considering that official estimates are that foreign national workers of all manner send ~$150,000,000,00.00 out of the USA every year, that is also money that is not only not earned by Americans, or kept in the American economy.
No one seems to want to care about the actual American working and lower class. Why should foreign nationals that have broken the law and are being used by the ruling class to enrich themselves by lowering wages and salaries take priority over American citizens? Are we no longer doing this democracy thing? Do citizens no longer have rights in their own countries anymore; while we advocate for the “rights” of foreigners to remain in a country they did not even ask, let alone receive permission to be in?
It does not seem like that can go on indefinitely without things breaking, economically, culturally, socially. Are we just not going to care about that?
People don’t have a great answer. The asylum process actually works- it just turns out that many, many cases aren’t valid and it was abused to gain entry once we allowed asylum seekers to remain in country.
Not that deportations are happening.
If it were up to me, I’d be pursuing some type of visa reform for permanent laborers that grants amnesty for those here with American citizen family members (i.e. birthright kids) as of a certain date. I’d make the asylum process occur outside of the country, signing agreements with the originating countries like Guatemala, Honduras to provide housing and food for asylum seekers while they pursue a claim.
This is only true if there are an equivalent number of unemployed Americans willing to work the same jobs for the same wage located in the same areas.
In Utah we have a pretty powerful tool for tracking police activity that can also be applied to ICE and focuses much more on identifying cops and linking them with incidents: https://app.copdb.org/
It's the kind of data I'd expect to see embedded in a long-form interactive report from a media outlet (with stories and pictures of what's going on etc)
Could you specifically explain what that 71.2% figure is?
Edit: Ah, if you hold your phone rotated the label “Not Convicted” appears. That is… a very odd way of spinning this data.
The dehumanization and persecution of immigrants by the current administration is disgusting and is immoral. I'm glad to see tech being used for good.
these things and others make one not like the other at all
put another way, was it really worth trashing the constitution and due process to get a 29% increase in deportation rates?
The main difference with Trump up to now has sensationalization of it and pushing the legal boundaries of those immigration laws.
Trump pushing the legal bounds on due process is not too different than when Obama pushed the legality of murdering of an American citizen without due process. Except Trump sensationalizes it while Obama layered it with a vaneer of intellectualism.
So: what do you think is about to happen?
If you look just at the ICE numbers, the difference is much more stark: a 3.5x increase.
I do think the Web site here could do a better job of clarifying this.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
Let me know if you think I could frame it better than I am, always open to feedback
There are some quantitative questions it would be good to clarify, too. For instance, "convicted criminal" - does this cover people convicted of real crimes, or fake ones engineered by the administration? "pending criminal charges" - are these arrests illegal or likely illegal? should they be portrayed in a hostile light, or just neutrally, as if the courts are going to find these people guilty they just haven't got to it yet. Other useful segments that are relevant include the splitting up of families, the detention of children and the vulnerable, withholding of medication and religious materials. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
In fact if you consider the question of what's the difference between "fascism" and "authoritarianism", the answer is that fascism is a subset of authoritarianism that focuses of business.
So yes, a lot of it is about money/business/economic impact. Always has been.
There's no inhumane treatment, especially for people respecting the basics of the laws of a country, and if you're in one illegally, you're the definition of an outlaw.
If hostile invaders suddenly just rushed the border to my home country, people wouldn't even talk of things such as "inhumane treatment". Shoot on sight wouldn't be abnormal.
"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy." Is not even properly framed and is found nowhere in the cited report.
Predictions of when you will die need a range in order to be attached to a number like accuracy. The attached report is not about this but about population-level mortality trends.