OpenICE: Open-Source US Immigration Detention Dashboard

https://www.openice.org/

156•supermaxman•7h ago

Comments

allthedatas•6h ago

Seems more like a scoreboard -- this may have the opposite effect the creators intended? The top 10 virus lists published by some vendors became that for virus writers.

supermaxman•6h ago

Any suggestions to change that perception? My goal is to educate how significant the impact is right now with these detainments & deportations, especially on people with zero criminal history.

imoverclocked•6h ago

You already calculate the economic impact of the loss of workers, you could reframe the detention rates based on that. Any way to obviously state, “more is worse,” is a good start.

imoverclocked•6h ago

Also, if you can manage to get the amount of funds used by ICE/CBP per period then you can also show how much is being sunk into this process too.

supermaxman•6h ago

Great ideas, I will look into getting this data into the stats. Thanks!

holmesworcester•6h ago

One other suggestion would be to include, somewhere, an image or oral account of detention conditions.

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.

supermaxman•6h ago

This is a great idea, will start to curate existing accounts & find a way to show alongside. Thanks!

giingyui•6h ago

I don’t imagine left-leaning people will cheer on the loss of cheap labour for millionaires.

holmesworcester•6h ago

I'm an experienced activist and if this was my issue area I would be heartened to see this kind of work.

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!

supermaxman•6h ago

Really appreciate these kind words, will take them to heart. I actually recently completed my PhD, and my research was in getting this kind of data for public health & building these kinds of dashboards for vaccine hesitancy from social media. I’ve always felt it’s important to present this stuff super clearly, so I’m happy to have a chance to do so on a seriously important topic like this.

bix6•6h ago

Maybe the economic impact to the top as a single line? Many people are single issue economics voters so make it clear how much this is hurting the economy. The human rights abuses are unfortunately irrelevant to many.

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.

dave_walko•5h ago

I know I will be downvoted but technically, they did commit a crime by coming here illegally.

danlitt•4h ago

I actually think this highlights an important point: the majority of "criminals" in the statistics are likely not to be criminals in any serious sense, and would pose no serious harm to any community whatsoever. After all, the US is a notorious over-incarcerator, and crimes are selectively enforced to keep the underclass in place (you may recall after all that the richest man in the country is an illegal immigrant).

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).

supermaxman•4h ago

Agree heavily with this. I will be adding more stats on this soon, but you can see on the map chart at the bottom that these detainees are overwhelmingly categorized (by ICE) as low or no threat level, even those convicted of minor offenses & misdemeanors. Very few are “Threat Level 1”, which are the “violent” offenders we hear so much about.

SauciestGNU•3h ago

You're downvoted because you're wrong. Illegal entry can be a crime, but that's far from the only way to there the country without legal status, and last I knew visa overstays were the most common immigration violation.

cheriot•5h ago

Maybe it's just me, but the words, "Other Immigration Violator" rubbed me the wrong way. I see it's a term from the source data and ICE describes the category as, "Other immigration violators are individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action."

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."

supermaxman•5h ago

Great feedback, will work on improving the language for these categories. I agree that ICE has chosen pretty inflammatory names for these otherwise presumptively innocent detainees

bb88•4h ago

One thing to do is to focus on the negative impacts.

Number of children separated from Families.

Number of US citizens illegally detained.

Number of lawsuits against ICE.

Cost of ICE vs each Detainee.

supermaxman•4h ago

Agree on all of these. Let me know if you know of any good sources of data for these numbers, I am actively looking to add them.

Nesco•6h ago

[flagged]

ryandrake•6h ago

Yea we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.

fingerlocks•6h ago

Yeah just CSS color swap the gains and losses to match fidelity or your preferred broker’s website. Seeing a bold green 175% gain in 6 months would make my lizard brain instinctively say “Hell Yeah!” before I even processed what I was reading.

danlitt•6h ago

Seems over-focussed on the economic impact. I have never seen a museum of concentration camp victims that highlighted how much they could have made number go up.

supermaxman•6h ago

Hey, this is super fair. I debated whether to include these numbers, but I felt it was a powerful message that, in a time when no one can afford an emergency in the US, the average detainment would be a massive cost. I understand if you feel going further and having the big number and the tax number is a bit insensitive, but my thinking was this could be a convincing common ground for conservatives who only care about $$$.

Let me know if you think I could frame it better than I am, always open to feedback

ryandrake•6h ago

Yea I was gonna say: frame it in some quantifiable terms of human suffering, except half the country enthusiastically cheers for human suffering, and would also turn it into a “suffering leaderboard.” We are living in dark times.

tehjoker•6h ago

The conservatives care about that but they have no broad political base so they must rely on racists. They’ll tolerate inefficiency so long as they feel they will still be on top. Appealing across the aisle isn’t likely to be impactful. Instead, mobilization of a left base is more useful if they can cause economic chaos for the regime and foil its plans. Don’t forget Kamala had an immigration crackdown plan too, the regime is both parties.

holmesworcester•6h ago

Definitely keep it. If someone is focused on the humanitarian aspect of this, they're the choir. No need to preach to them. See my above comment about including some credibly-neutral description of detention conditions, including the psychological aspect of there being zero process and total chaos.

danlitt•5h ago

My reply seems at face value to contradict this one, but I don't actually disagree, depending on what you mean by neutral. Certainly any comment should be based in facts, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what the admin is doing both truthfully and in a non-negative light.

danlitt•5h ago

I think the lost-revenue number is important and relevant, it underlines the hypocrisy of US fascism to be claiming on the one hand to balance the books while spending billions of dollars on performative cruelty. But I do think only presenting the numbers in isolation is insufficient, and comes off a little strange. Even a little blurb at the top (this is an unprecedented failure of the rule of law, ICE agents frequently arrest people illegally, this kind of thing) would be an improvement. It isn't actually clear at face value whether you think this project is morally wrong, or just expensive.

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.

supermaxman•5h ago

Great feedback, will work on this. Much of the language is from ICE in their released statistics, which is why it is vague. Will improve this for sure

stevenwoo•6h ago

I think it's hard to capture in a few numbers - it's not exactly analogous, for instance in Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War, specifically her reports from Western European theater of WW2, she could never forget that part of the stated purpose by Nazi officals for those concentration camps and other captured peoples made to work for Nazi regime in other areas was to extract maximal economic value from them while working them to death and the German people as a whole felt essentially zero impact on their day to day life and benefited from the crops and material looted from captured territories or created by those captured by the Nazis, not to mention all the valuables looted from the people sent to concentration camps in forms of their business capital/jewelry/extracted gold teeth/other personal valuables. In one sense these current day agricultural/trade workers/labor system are subsidizing a lower price of some agricultural/trade products at least in the market we had. If we had a perfect market, the labor cost should go up in their absence to attract domestic workers in hand with end product cost though this has not happened in several prior crackdowns on undocumented immigrant labor in the USA. In addition to direct citizen monetary costs we might count a.) the spending on ICE b.) the discretionary funding by executive branch to farmers/ranchers to replace lost income as happened in aftermath of Trump's first term tariff regime.

jxjnskkzxxhx•5h ago

Not a museum, but you might be interested to know that a lot of historians argue that "the industrialists" in late 1920s and 1930s Germany went along with the holocaust because for a lot of them it just meant more business, and for some free labour.

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.

danlitt•4h ago

Yes, certainly. The economic effect of forced labour, and its impact on the motivations of people, is historically important. I only intended to question the highlighting. A statement like "people went along with the evils of the holocaust because they were motivated by money" is one thing; "a holocaust would be good for business" is another.

tiahura•6h ago

So we went from just shy of 25000/mo under Biden to 35000/mo under Trump and supposedly this is just unbelievably over-the-top?

uoaei•6h ago

The concern has never, ever been about amount. It's always been about the methods that employ violence and a disruption of the social order.

Trasmatta•6h ago

In case you missed it, congress just gave ICE an unprecedented $175 billion. They want this to escalate much, much further.

supermaxman•6h ago

This increase in the last 6 months is concerning, to me. Especially when we realize the vast majority, and even more so now, are non-criminal “No Threat Level”, as designated by ICE themselves. Check out the map at the bottom to see how many people with zero criminal history are being held daily in each state. It should be concerning, and I think these numbers need to be shouted from the rooftops that things are going in a bad direction here

charcircuit•6h ago

Deporting no threat people is important as to start encouraging them to actually self deport. Without it there would be no rush and they could rely on being at the bottom of the list and stay in the US longer.

Nasrudith•4h ago

The whole effort economically is about as important and urgent as paying somebody to key your own car or punch you in the face.

charcircuit•4h ago

If your choices are between being punched in the face or punched in the face and given $1000 it seems natural to pick the latter.

convolvatron•6h ago

I think quite a bit of the concern is the lack of due process, the jailing of people for an an indefinite period in a random country, the detention of legal permanent residents and US citizens, the willful disregard of court orders, the use of immigration as a cudgel to attack universities, defining protected speech as 'illegal' and grounds for detention, deportation, or imprisonment.

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?

elcritch•6h ago

Well the law to allow deportations without due process was passed by congress under Clinton as I understand it.

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.

CamperBob2•6h ago

Under Trump, the agency in question now has an annual budget on the scale of the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project.

So: what do you think is about to happen?

valleyer•5h ago

IMO, you should consider only the ICE numbers, not the CBP numbers. The CBP numbers are people being turned away at the border, which is a different category of action than arresting people already living in the US (sometimes for many years).

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.

monkaiju•6h ago

Love to see people trying to quantify the violence of the state. Like some other comments I agree focusing on the economic impact might be a bit of a distraction, but if it helps put a stop to this then so be it...

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/

supermaxman•6h ago

Yea, I want to make it as clear as possible these numbers are not a good thing, but I’m always going to lose the personal element in the numbers. But we need to know the numbers, unfortunately. They help us direct our outrage. Each of these are a person stripped away from their family for overwhelmingly no good reason

one-note•6h ago

What is the meaning of the percentage inside the “Detainee Criminal Information” pie chat? I see 71.2% nominally, then 100% whenever filters are applied.

supermaxman•6h ago

This may just be the wrong behavior from what people expect. The center percent is just the percent that are not convinced of the selected filters. So depending on what you select, that will change.

one-note•5h ago

Sorry… what does “the percent that are not convinced of the selected filters” mean?

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.

supermaxman•5h ago

We, in fact, do have a presumption of innocence in the US. So yes, other than those convicted of crimes, others are non-convicted detainees. These people may be detained for quite a long time, too. That is the point this dashboard is making

one-note•5h ago

I understand the intended spin. The claim is that it’s implantation is heavy handed and half baked.

wskinner•6h ago

Why do the data only go back to October 2024? It would be great to be able to see the longer term trends.

supermaxman•6h ago

The data is provided by ICE in terms of financial years (FY), so I’m showing the most recent FY 2025. But they do have back to FY2019 on their site, and I plan to add that historical data soon!

octo888•6h ago

Not to denigrate the work but: I hate it and I can't fully describe why. There are no pictures of any people and barely any human element at all. There's too little context. Too much potential for it to be a scoreboard.

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)

supermaxman•6h ago

Hey, totally with you on this. Others also suggested adding some anecdotes and accounts from detainees, so this will be a top priority going forward. My goal was just to get this data in front of people, so we can accurately direct our outrage. Documenting the statistics as early as possible, as I expect these numbers will continue to rise

paulmist•6h ago

Curiously they used AWS' design system https://cloudscape.design/

supermaxman•5h ago

Yes, I have always thought cloudscape design is a great framework to build dashboards like this. Feel free to check out the source code for the whole project as an example, everything is open-source!

jeremynixon•6h ago

This blog post is flawed.

"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.

supermaxman•5h ago

I think you posted on the wrong article. I do not believe I included any life insurance claims in this dashboard

noracists•6h ago

Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.

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.

Trasmatta•5h ago

These things escalate and evolve over time. The holocaust didn't suddenly happen in a vacuum or overnight. Please don't discount or normalize the danger of things like the way the right has been talking about things like "Alligator Alcatraz". Or about the insane funding ICE has received, and the additional camps they want to build.

maxlin•2h ago

That kind of slippery slope is so silly it could be as well applied to IRS.

Eextra953•5h ago

This is great work thank you for creating this. There a few times when technical skills can help with national discourse and this is a great example of that.

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.

hopelite•5h ago

I find this topic rather interesting from a historical and sociopolitical one.

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?

leoqa•4h ago

I always like to frame it this way: ask someone what a reasonable response would be if they flew to Paris and then decided they didn’t want to leave. What is the French government allowed to do in their moral framework to enforce their immigration laws.

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.

djleni•3h ago

I’m sure some people don’t like any deportations, but I think the reason the bulk of people are upset with the current administration’s approach is its insane militarization, lack of due process, refusal to identify, apparent targeting of normal hard working people, sending people directly to foreign prisons, and sending people to war torn countries they are not from with minimal notice and no opportunity to contest.

Not that deportations are happening.

int_19h•1h ago

My answer would depend strongly on where the person is from and what their circumstances are like there.

djleni•4h ago

> the inverse is that it is “$1.49 billion” that Americans are not earning

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.

sudosteph•4h ago

I know the color scheme was probably selected to emphasize that increased ICE actions are bad, but it's weird to me to see positive percentages in red. The negative ones are kind of yellowish? I think maybe black or green for positive and red for negative would make it look more serious.

supermaxman•4h ago

Feedback heard. I am taking the position that increased ICE detainments and lengths of detainments are bad for this dashboard, so I am going to be avoiding green for increases (as that can be interpreted as good). But I understand it can be a bit strange coloring, will consider other options

yablak•2h ago

I'd like to see this breakdown of ICE employees themselves. If they're "public servants", is this data also public?

maxlin•2h ago

Anonymized, maybe. But the risk of crazies deanonymizing them for doing their appreciable job is still there so probably not best to store those centrally anywhere, if they're even meaningfully collected.

int_19h•2h ago

Making the bullies afraid is a good thing.

maxlin•2h ago

Those are rookie numbers, got to pump them up!

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