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OpenICE: Open-Source US Immigration Detention Dashboard

173 points| supermaxman | 7 months ago |openice.org

135 comments

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allthedatas|7 months 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|7 months 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.

fingerlocks|7 months 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.

TiredOfLife|7 months ago

Good old "If you don't like the data change the presentation"

Nesco|7 months ago

[flagged]

yablak|7 months ago

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

maxlin|7 months 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.

paulmist|7 months ago

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

supermaxman|7 months 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!

wskinner|7 months 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|7 months 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!

hopelite|7 months 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|7 months 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.

clayhacks|7 months ago

It would not be a direct substitution of American labor if these people remain deported. There’s been labor shortages in many of these industries for years, there’s reason to believe that even more money will be lost by businesses that couldn’t hire enough people. I’d love it if they raised wages, but business owners usually aren’t keen on that, and if they did they’d likely raise prices as a result. The other possibility could be bankruptcy or offshoring of these businesses. I think if anything the $1.49 billion is an underestimate of the impact.

djleni|7 months 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.

monkaiju|7 months 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|7 months 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

sudosteph|7 months 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|7 months 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

octo888|7 months 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|7 months 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

one-note|7 months 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|7 months 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.

Eextra953|7 months 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.

tiahura|7 months 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?

convolvatron|7 months 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?

supermaxman|7 months 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

valleyer|7 months 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.

uoaei|7 months 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.

CamperBob2|7 months 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?

Trasmatta|7 months ago

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

noracists|7 months 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|7 months 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.

shrubble|7 months ago

[deleted]

jdgoesmarching|7 months ago

It’s crazy to still use a dehumanizing term like illegals when referring to people holding up large segments of the economy while being illegally underpaid by employers. Not even in a politically correct sense, it’s such an obviously propagandized term that I’m surprised people are still gullible enough to use it.

Are you usually this concerned about negligible amounts of taxes not being collected, or only when it concerns some of the most powerless, exploited, and hardworking people in our communities?

I only ask so future historians can better understand the rhetoric used to justify the nakedly authoritarian kidnapping and imprisonment of Latinos and political opponents.

lalaland1125|7 months ago

> It's hilarious that the dashboard is claiming that illegals pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else

The dashboard is explicitly not doing that. They cite, and use numbers from, research reports that explicitly estimate the taxes that illegal immigrants pay.

You can disagree with their analysis, but they are not making the assumption you are claiming they are making.

divbzero|7 months ago

I don’t actually see the where the dashboard claims that the average tax rate is the same as the larger population.

The dashboard does say that undocumented immigrants pay

> an average tax revenue rate of 29.5%, supported by various sources [3, 4, 5, 6]

without saying anything about the average tax rate for the whole population.

lazide|7 months ago

Typical ‘illegals’ (aka laborers, line workers) IF they’re paid a W2 payroll, certainly do pay taxes like everyone else. They’ll generally never be able to actually draw down that SS tax, etc. they’re paying in, however.

The SSA could easily stop this, but isn’t interested in doing so. They’ll happily go after folks trying to get payments out however.

Being paid under the table is of course different, but then that is as much the employer as anyone else eh?

staplers|7 months ago

  at the same rate as everyone else
I know plenty of Americans who do this so that tracks. Gonna have to find another metric to use to validate your morally bankrupt position.

danlitt|7 months 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|7 months 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

jxjnskkzxxhx|7 months 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.

stevenwoo|7 months 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.

maxlin|7 months ago

Those are rookie numbers, got to pump them up!

pacomerh|7 months ago

So you're essentially trying to increase the negative economic impact, not to mention the inhumane treatment.

jeremynixon|7 months 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|7 months ago

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