TRAC has lots of immigration data. Here's how we get it.

I’ve been at TRAC for a little over a year now. I joined the research organization last year when they were looking for someone who understood both how the immigration system worked on a practical and institutional level, but also had the quantitative skills to do the kind of detailed analysis that is TRAC’s bread and butter. Here’s a brief primer on how TRAC gets data from the government.

TRAC's data is obtained from federal agencies through Freedom of Information Act requests as well as directly from the federal courts. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which was passed in 1966 and later strengthened in 1974 following the Watergate scandal, is a pillar of democracy and government transparency.

FOIA allows the public to request and obtain any federal agency record as long as that information does not fall under several types of exemptions designed to safeguard national security, personal privacy, and other specific matters. FOIA requests have become a commonplace way for US citizens to learn about how their government works and to participate in democratic accountability.

Rather than requesting documents, TRAC uses FOIA to obtain data from the government's own internal databases. Since the 1980s, the government has increasingly used databases to manage and record their activities. One type of database stores documents electronically and allows searching through them using various tags and text strings. Other large, complex databases contain the "transactional" records of what agencies are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.

Accessing and understanding federal transactional databases requires specialized knowledge, technological resources, and sometimes legal knowledge which TRAC has developed over thirty years of experience. TRAC's data-driven research provides the public with insights about government activity that are essential to fostering an informed public, which is paramount for the flourishing of democracy.

This is how TRAC obtains data about immigration enforcement activity. As the immigration system grew rapidly in recent decades, the government transitioned to using databases to manage its responsibilities. Part of TRAC's mission is to obtain this data, organize it in ways that are meaningful and useful, and make it available to the public.

Out of this data, we create a variety of immigration data tools available here.