DEATHS AND DETENTION RESULTING FROM ICE ACTIONS DASHBOARD
This interactive dashboard allows users to explore the U.S. immigration detention system throughout Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 to Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, with a particular focus on trends since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second administration in late January 2025. Users can examine how detention has changed over time, where detention occurs, and which demographic groups are primarily affected. Building on government data provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR), the dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of the actions and impact of ICE, including information on detention facilities, detainee deaths, detention and removals, and the incarceration of children.
The dashboard is constructed largely from administrative ICE datasets containing individual detention stays, facility-level periods of detention, and daily detention populations, supplemented by geographic facility data and detainee death data obtained through official ICE releases and media publications. The dashboard was built in Python with the Dash package using the Plotly and Folium packages for visualizations. Data were cleaned, standardized, and aggregated as necessary to analyze detention across facilities and time periods, primarily using Pandas. Because a single individual may have multiple detention stays or facility stays, the dashboard distinguishes between measures of individuals, stays, and facility-level events where appropriate.
The interactive map provides a geographic overview of immigration detention facilities across the United States. Users can explore individual facilities and access facility-level summary information about detention populations directly from the map, which provides geographic content for patterns in detention. The map allows users to view how detention is distributed spatially across the country and examine differences between facilities and regions.
The dashboard’s graphs and visualizations present trends and patterns across deaths, detention, removals, and children in detention. These visualizations aim to provide users with the opportunity to examine demographic trends, detention durations, and changes in detention over time. These figures provide a broad picture of the scale and development of immigration detention. On the second page, interactive filters allow users to disaggregate results by available demographic characteristics, select different time periods, and explore individual facilities. The tables are designed to support researchers who want to investigate individual records or facility-level patterns beyond general trends shown in the visualizations.
The dashboard is intended to be used as a public access tool to easily examine the scale, impact, and geographic distribution of immigration detention, primarily from a public health perspective. While the underlying administrative data provide necessary and helpful information, several variables contain missing or inconsistent values, and not every available measure represents unique individuals. These limitations should be considered when examining the dashboard.
This dashboard was developed between June and August 2026 by Nidhi Ram supervised by Nadejda Marques, with comments and suggestions from Jordan Stipp, Leyly Moridi and Nicholas Rodelo. The tool is still under development, as new data and information become available. Please share any comments, feedback, or additional information over email.