Discover a Detention Facility Near You: A Community Exercise in Civic Awareness

Help build a learning community around detention data. Get hands-on with the newly updated facility numbers at DetentionReports.com and add your own findings and perspectives.

Adam Sawyer and the team at Relevant Research just updated the Detention Reports website with new facility-level data on ICE facilities across the country. ICE is currently (officially) using 192 facilities and holding a record 61,226 people.

As a standard practice, whenever I get new immigration data, I try to distill the key takeaway points for you, provide context for the data, and create straightforward visualizations that highlight important trends. This practice is intentional. I have long argued that simply making data publicly available is only part of government transparency. Translating data into objective, insightful, and actionable information is a crucial part of authentic transparency.

But today is different. Today, I would like to incorporate yet another part of government transparency: civic education. Rather than telling you what the numbers show, I want you to examine the data for yourself. I am inviting you to be a part of the process by bringing your experience, your perspective, and your curiosity to bear on the study of the US immigration detention system. As I wrote in my 200th Substack post, “curiosity means being driven by a particular question, but not a particular answer.”

My invitation to curiosity is an invitation to engage with the data that shapes our communities, often in ways we don't see or fully appreciate. As residents and citizens of this country, we have both the right and responsibility to understand how our government functions and to ensure that our political values are informed by facts rather than immune to them.

Most importantly, I invite you to share your observations within your online or offline community rather than doing this exercise in isolation. You can help build a civic learning community by sharing this post and your findings on your most active social media platform, over text with friends and family (including people you might normally disagree with), or help us create a learning community in the comments section below. If you are a teacher, you might consider sharing this exercise (or your own version of it) with your students.

Your Assignment (If You Choose to Accept It)

Below is a suggested plan of four questions to guide your exploration. Although I do not expect you to entirely ignore your values and opinion about immigration, I do invite you to set those aside for a moment so that your mind is ready to learn rather than hunkered down in a position of defensiveness.

Step 1: Find the detention center(s) nearest to you. Visit DetentionReports.com and search for facilities close to you. You might be surprised to find there's one closer than you think. Many operate in rural areas or on the outskirts of cities, deliberately placed away from public view, while other facilities are located in major cities as part of a local jail.

Consider the following questions:

• Were you surprised by the location of the nearest facility?

• How close is the facility to other facilities? Are they clustered together in a region or spread out across the state or across several states?

Step 2: Examine the Data. Look at the numbers we present using our Interval Average Daily Population (Interval ADP) methodology. Remember: this is ICE's own data. The reports represent ICE’s records and categories—not ours. We've simply calculated recent population estimates in a way that reveals patterns ICE's standard reporting tends to obscure.

Ask yourself:

• How many people are currently being held there?

• How does this compare to the facility's year-to-date average?

• What trends do you notice in the visualizations?

• What does the data reveal about who is being held in the facility?

Step 3: Dig Deeper into Stories and Research. Once you've absorbed the numbers, spend some time learning about the facility itself. Using online research, identify news stories that mention the facility, find photos and videos that paint a picture of the architecture of the facility and life inside, and search for in-depth government or NGO reports that deepen your understanding and highlight possible issues at the facility.

As you research, consider:

• What patterns emerge across different sources about conditions at this facility?

• How do the stories and experiences of people who have been detained there compare to the official data?

• What role does this facility play in the broader landscape of your local community's economy and politics?

• How has coverage of this facility changed over time, and what might that tell us about shifting public attention or policy priorities?

Step 4: Critical Reflection. Now that you’ve learned more about your local detention facility, step back and consider some larger questions. Now is a good time to bring your values and personal experience back into the discussion so that you can consider how your values shape your interpretation of the data—or possibly how the data challenges you to revise or refine your values.

Reflect on these questions:

• What assumptions or expectations did you bring to this data, and how did your personal values and experiences shape what you noticed or found significant?

• What does it tell us about our democratic systems when basic information about government operations requires specialized knowledge or methods to access and interpret?

• How do the geographic placement and public visibility of detention facilities reflect broader social and political choices about whose suffering we're meant to see?

Let’s Build a Learning Community

Now that you’ve learned so much, please share your observations, reflections, and questions online or in the comments below. Here are some discussion prompts to get us started, but you are invited to participate in any way that makes sense for you. Respectful disagreements are welcomed and encouraged.

1. Your observations: What patterns or trends do you notice in the data? What surprises you? What confirms what you already suspected?

2. Your questions: What would you want to know about this facility or the people being held there that isn't available in ICE's public data? What additional context do you think is missing? Questions about the Detention Reports project itself?

3. Your knowledge: Have you seen recent reporting about your local facility? Know of in-depth investigations or community organizing efforts around it? Share links and insights.

4. Your critiques: How are we visualizing this data? What could we do differently to make it more useful or accessible? What other questions should we be asking?

Thank You for Thinking With Us

Thank you for taking the time to engage with this data and for contributing to our collective understanding. While Adam and I both bring our values to our work, we are first and foremost naturally curious people who are eager to learn from all of you. Whether you share detailed research, ask probing questions, or simply take a few minutes to look up your local facility, you're participating in the kind of informed citizenship that is fundamental to democracy and realizes the goal of authentic government transparency. Thank you for staying curious.

If you have specific questions or comments about Detention Reports or if you are looking for in-depth support on your immigration research project, please reach out to Adam Sawyer at Relevant Research.

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