New Immigration Enforcement Dashboard Makes ICE Arrest Data Accessible to More People

New Immigration Enforcement Dashboard makes Deportation Data Project data accessible through interactive visualizations, bridging the gap between complex datasets and public understanding.

The Deportation Data Project (DDP) has raised the bar this year in what government transparency looks like. Their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation have made more immigration data freely available to the public this year than ever before, ushering in a new era of open source data analysis and public accountability at precisely the time when immigration enforcement has intensified.

The availability of large administrative datasets on ICE arrests, detention, detainers, and deportations, as well as CBP encounters, has its own challenges, however. Not everyone has the technical infrastructure, domain expertise, or analytical experience to produce findings they feel confident about. Thus, the Deportation Data Project’s data creates a new need and a new opportunity to bridge that gap between these incredibly valuable datasets and a wider public that is more interested in simply what the data says rather than taking part in the joy of nuanced data analysis for its own sake.

To meet this need, I am eager to announce a new Immigration Enforcement Dashboard that makes the Deportation Data Project’s data accessible through interactive data visualizations and simple documentation that should meet the needs of most people and answer the majority of the basic questions I tend to receive on a daily basis. I am grateful to the many reporters and researchers who have reached out with DDP data questions over the past few months because it has helped me think through how best to summarize the data.

Currently, only ICE arrests are included, and of that dataset, only essential fields are included—though the dashboard will be expanded shortly with more datasets and more in-depth arrest data. While my goal is to make the data appear as simple and straightforward as possible, this requires a series of deliberative, subjective decisions to ensure that the data and the corresponding data visualizations are accurate, legible to a broad non-specialist audience, and avoids undue politicization or sensationalization that could undermine the objectivity of the underlying data.

Visit the dashboard at https://enforcementdashboard.com/ and bookmark it so that you can come back to it as a resource. We don’t currently have a way to notify the public about updates, so the best way to stay up-to-date is just to follow me here on Substack. If you have questions, comments, or concerns, please post them in the comments below rather than emailing me if at all possible, or email Adam Sawyer at Relevant Research.

The screenshots below preview some of the core functionality. We start with the total number of records in the dashboard. Everything below that total number represents slices of that number, which are reflected in the filtered number of arrests.

This isn’t rocket science, just a simple bar graph. But we were sure to include the precise numbers in the graph itself. It does add some busyness to the figure, but we wanted to err on the side of precision and transparency. We do not currently have a way to download the filtered subset of data, but we are working on that.

The dashboard includes a map of arrests by state. Note that about 20 percent of the arrests do not list a state, so those are excluded. Also excluded are arrests that took place outside of the 50 U.S. states, including outlying territories like Puerto Rico and Guam. You can see these in the filtering menu.

The dashboard includes a map of arrests by ICE’s Areas of Responsibility, which are administrative geographic divisions that do not correspond neatly to state boundaries. We use a proportional box chart to show this.

I hope this new dashboard prompts curiosity and engagement. Please test it out, send feedback, and share it with others who might benefit from seeing this data.

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