Even as a fairly tech-forward person, my most valuable tools are often decidedly analog: a pad of giant graph paper, Post-it Notes littering my hallway wall, and whiteboards where I mind-map research projects before writing them up. Visual methods are powerful because they allow us to break free from linear, sequential thinking and see relationships between things—ideas, processes, data—from multiple angles at once. Beyond analysis, visual methods also help us create conceptual models, frameworks that clarify how different pieces of data within a system connect and interact. This is exactly what I want to share with you today.
Let me show you how this works in practice with a current challenge I’m wrestling with. Over the past week, I’ve been looking into DHS’s claim that it deported 622,000 people and trying to reverse-engineer that number given the lack of transparency surrounding DHS’s enforcement data. In my previous post and live discussion, I explained my skepticism about that number and outlined two key problems: the potential inaccuracy itself, and DHS’s troubling lack of transparency around enforcement data.
Although many immigration reporters and analysts have raised concerns about DHS’s purported deportation numbers, I don’t believe anyone else has tried to unpack, in writing, why these concerns exist and how we should think about DHS’s statistical claims. (If I’m wrong, please point me to those sources.) The reason for this gap is likely that the analysis is genuinely complex—requiring deep dives into definitional questions and multiple, often contradictory data sources. That’s why it’s taken me this long to write about it, at least. Counting “deportations” turns out to be far more complicated than it appears, and the definition matters enormously.
Can we use visual thinking to make this complexity more accessible and raise the quality of the conversation for everyone, regardless of political perspective? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week, and I think I’ve found an approach that helps. While trying to make sense of DHS’s enforcement numbers, I created a simple diagram that clarified the relationships between different data points. I’ve made countless diagrams like this over the years for my own understanding, but this one felt worth sharing. It might help you navigate this messy data, too.