DIGGING IN: UC Berkeley Law Professor David Hausman reviews new information about immigration detention patterns. Photo by Darius Riley

As the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began and expanded its crackdown on undocumented immigrants after President Donald Trump took office, researchers, advocates, and journalists ran into a brick wall. The agency, already slow to share information about detainees, clamped down even harder.

Thanks to a grant-funded project led by UC Berkeley Law Professor David Hausman, this critical data is becoming public — and it’s already helping to highlight trends.

STEP BY STEP: Hausman, shown here with his dog Ernie, has seen the project gain interest from journalists, researchers, lawyers, and policymakers. Photo by Darius Riley

The Deportation Data Project has obtained and posted individual-level data sets tracking every arrest, detention, and deportation conducted by ICE. These datasets include anonymized identifiers that correspond to people, allowing users to follow individual people through the enforcement process without learning their identities.

The project got the data through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, which is represented by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and Amber Qureshi, now the project’s litigation director.

The first three batches of records covered the end of the Biden administration and the first five months of Trump’s. The project will continue to seek updates to the data under FOIA.

Hausman first began tapping into ICE data while he was a lawyer with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, using FOIA requests and lawsuits to access the government’s own counts to help clients challenge the length of their detention without coming before a judge.

That experience helped forge the backbone of Hausman’s research agenda, which revolves around empirical measurements of immigration enforcement, and he wanted to make it easier for others to get. After settling into his new role at UC Berkeley Law, he began raising money to launch the project.

“We’ve got this group of people, we know which data sets to ask for, and we’re requesting them regularly,” says Hausman. “When we don’t get them, we’re suing the government to get them, and when we do get them, we’re putting them up on the website for everyone to see.”

It’s vital to access the data at the granular level, he adds, in order to assess real trends rather than just compile anecdotes.

“These are instead attacks on democracy and the rule of law that are clothed in immigration policy. It’s really important to notice where that’s happening.”

— David Hausman

“In terms of analysis, you can figure out exactly which questions you want to answer with it, and you don’t have to depend on the government aggregating it in some particular way in order to determine which questions you ask,” Hausman says.

News organizations hungry for information, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg News, scooped up the project’s data right away as the administration pursues detaining and deporting far more people than in previous years. The result has been hundreds of articles tracking ICE enforcement actions, both at the local and national level.

As important as data is, the whole story is more complex. Some of the administration’s policies — including deportations under the Alien Enemies Act and detentions of non-citizens for their speech in protests or writings — “are really only incidentally related to immigration,” Hausman says.

“These are instead attacks on democracy and the rule of law that are clothed in immigration policy,” he says. “It’s really important to notice where that’s happening.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw