Over 50 people have died in ICE custody since the start of the current administration, an alarming number that is currently increasing at the rate of one roughly every 9 days. I write about these deaths because I want the public to understand the context and consequences of the U.S.’s growing immigrant detention system and I believe in making this work legible to as much of the public as possible. While new headlines often focus on a single case, as a researcher, I believe in putting individual cases within a larger geographic and historical arc to encourage deeper critical thought.
Click here to see all of my posts about ICE’s detention deaths.
Like so much of my work, writing about these tragedies requires rigorous behind-the-scenes information management to ensure that I’m working with a validated data set of cases with preserved links, archived materials, and carefully structured metadata that facilitates independent, non-partisan analysis. I am a researcher, first and foremost. But my identity as a researcher is enabled by another core identity: I am a systems-builder. These systems, most of which are invisible, help me find patterns and write quickly for a broad audience.
But sometimes, in the course of building systems for my own work, I stumble onto something I realize would be valuable to make public, too. This is a principle best articulated in Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work!, which I highly recommend.
The Detention Mortality Dashboard is an example of this. Launching today, the Detention Mortality Dashboard is a repository of official ICE custodial deaths from 2018 until now, with searchable case-level information, source materials, and an interactive map. What started out as a simple spreadsheet with a few fields is now a more robust public tool.
Much of the credit goes to my amazing colleague Bishal Timsina for doing the heavy lifting to make this project possible. Bishal is one of the developers on the team at Relevant Research, the same team behind Detention Reports, the Enforcement Dashboard, Relevant Football, and Paradarsita — as well as the migration of ImmProf Blog, the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Detention Pregnancy Tracker, and American Families United’s Collateral Damage Report. Huge thanks to everyone else on the team who provided support and feedback.
This work is intended to complement, rather than duplicate, the independent tracking conducted by people like Andrew Free at Detention Kills, Eyes On ICE, and others whose work I have relied upon and respect enormously.
The philosophy behind the dashboard
Although the concept behind the dashboard may seem simple, we take this work seriously and we put a lot of thought into how we executed this project. Let’s start with our shared humanity—and our shared mortality.
The death of anyone is a serious matter, and it is all the more serious when that person dies while in a controlled facility run by a government agency that chooses to take responsibility for their care and well-being. Collating these tragedies together under one dashboard has the potential to blunt the humanity behind each story and treat life and death as mere datapoints. Even if this is not the intent, it may be a regrettable side-effect.
At the same time, allowing the details surrounding these deaths to remain scattered across government webpages is its own kind of irresponsibility. The disorganized nature of this information makes it more difficult to see these stories, and the institutions where they occur, as part of a broader pattern that deserves scrutiny.
Whether we effectively balanced these interests will be up to the public.
Note that we refer to this as a “mortality” dashboard, not simply a “death” dashboard. This is intentional. Whereas death often connotes individuality, mortality reflects a public health framework that seeks to understand individual deaths as the product of socialized and institutionalized risk factors that can be mitigated only through systemic change.
About the ICE Detention Mortality Dashboard
I am eager to show you the dashboard, but bear with me. With the proliferation of AI, there is an explosion of overnight “dashboards” out there from unknown and often unnamed contributors and very few of them do the hard work of explaining the decisions that went into the work (sometimes because there’s no human with domain expertise actually making any decisions). So let’s go over the basics.
Who should use the Detention Mortality Dashboard?
We believe a wide audience will find this useful. Here are just a few examples:
Reporters covering a death at a specific facility can use it to quickly see whether that death fits a pattern or stands alone.
Researchers and advocates documenting conditions at a facility over time can use it alongside the underlying detention population data at Detention Reports.
Families and legal counsel trying to understand what’s happened at a facility where a loved one or client is held now have a starting point that doesn’t require knowing which press release to search for.
Elected officials and their staff can get the latest numbers and details from an independent, non-partisan researcher who can also answer further questions.
Where does the data come from?
The data we collected here are from publicly available ICE records. These come from two sources:
Detainee Death Notifications, the press releases ICE publishes on its News Releases and Statements page announcing that someone has died.
Detainee Death Reports, more detailed reports that ICE is required to eventually publish on its Detainee Death Reporting page.
These sources are imperfect, increasingly brief, and frequently delayed. If you want to see what these reports miss, listen to my conversation with St. John Barned-Smith and Ko Lyn Cheang of the San Francisco Chronicle regarding what they found when they compared ICE’s official narratives to family accounts and medical records. The Detention Mortality Dashboard is a starting point for that kind of scrutiny, not a substitute for it.
We do not currently attempt to collect additional information about ICE’s detention deaths. Finding and vetting such information would, by itself, require enormous effort for which we do not have the capacity, and would turn this into a full-blown research project. That said, we hope that this project provides a trusted resource and starting point for further investigation.
What data is available?
The main questions we sought to answer in this project were: who died, when did they die, and where did they die.
Who. We include names, ages at time of death, and nationality. This information is included in nearly all ICE Detainee Death Notifications, and the database is searchable.
When. We include date of actual death and date of ICE’s announcement. As I said above, these notifications can be delayed; this allows the public to view how late the announcements are.
Where. This question is more challenging than it may appear. Although these deaths all involve people in ICE custody, “custody” can still mean in a hospital outside of a detention facility. (See my related conversation with NILC.) So we decided to capture both the detention facility where people were last held and the facility or location where they actually passed.
How can I help ensure that this work is sustainable?
I’m so glad you asked! Much of my public scholarship is powered through the generous support of paid Substack subscribers. Many people assume that this is extra “spending money” on top of a stable salary. This is not the case. My work has always been independently and creatively funded—and now I’m asking you to support this work with a few bucks a month or each year. I have years of evidence now to show that my research has been able to maintain rigorous quality while also generating an outsized impact on our national immigration conversation, including connecting with people across the political spectrum. Is ensuring that this work continues worth $7 a month or $70 a year to you? If your answer is “yes,” please click the link below to help me keep the lights on.