1. You’ve helped put together a repository of federal immigration enforcement data called the Deportation Data Project. How did it come to be?
I was an immigrants’ rights lawyer for a few years, but I am also a social scientist.
What those two roles had in common was these data sets that the federal government keeps for its own operational purposes. For a long time, I had thought somebody should really put these together in a single place online and systematically update them so that they can be used to track what’s happening in immigration enforcement. And then in early 2025, together with two colleagues, UCLA Professor Graeme Blair and immigrant rights attorney Amber Qureshi, we decided to finally do that.
2. What are some of the major takeaways from the data?
First of all, there has been a huge change in the amount of enforcement within the United States. So, way more immigration arrests within the United States, way more people being placed in detention after being arrested within the United States.
Now, if you look at just deportations over time, those don’t necessarily look like they’ve changed that much. The reason for that is that the [total deportation rate] masks two countervailing trends. On the one hand, there are many fewer deportations happening at the border now, because many fewer people are crossing the border. And on the other hand, there are many more deportations happening after arrests in the interior, because there’s so much more enforcement there. And by the interior, I mean within the United States, away from the border. Both trends suggest increasing enforcement.
In terms of interior enforcement, the data clearly shows that it’s becoming less targeted, more indiscriminate. So the proportion of people arrested who have been convicted of crime has gone way down under the new administration, just because they’re casting a wider net.
The other aspect of that is that, traditionally, immigration arrests have been transfers of people who were already arrested locally on suspicion of a crime. Over the past couple of decades, the large majority of immigration arrests within the United States happened inside a jail or prison. That too has been changing over the last few months, with those arrests continuing, but a lot more arrests also happening out in the community. And those are the arrests we’ve been seeing footage of: masked agents driving around and arresting people out on the street.
3. Does the data align with the Trump administration’s characterization of their deportation efforts?
The Trump administration partly agrees with this. It agrees that there have been many more arrests in the interior of the United States. But the administration is trapped by this impossible promise that it was going to do mass deportations of people who’d been convicted of crimes. And that’s just impossible, because there are very few non-citizens in the United States who’ve been convicted of crimes. So if the administration wants mass deportations, the only way to do that is to deport lots and lots of people who have never committed any crimes.
4. Why are projects like the Deportation Data Project important, and how has it been used?
There are a couple of ways the data has been used. For example, there was a letter from California Republican legislators to the administration that draws on reporting using the data to push back on the Trump administration’s use of indiscriminate immigration arrests.
It was also cited in court in a case in Los Angeles that produced an order requiring ICE to change its approach to arrests there.
And the data has also been used to show what’s happening at specific detention centers—how long people are staying there, how many people are in them.
In order to know what’s happening in this kind of mass policy, you need mass information. And that’s what data is.
5. The administration has a track record of ignoring data. What would you say in response to that?
I think, ultimately, data just reflects reality, and in the end, everyone has to come to grips with reality.
