source: Austin Kocher Substack (to read the full article with context providing graphics click down below)
https://www.detentionmortality.com/
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.
What data is not available?
Notice that we did not seek to answer the question of why did someone die in ICE custody. ICE lists some of the circumstances surrounding each death in their official notice and adds more information in their subsequent reports. Based on the full range of available research, I am not convinced that either of these sources provides a sufficient accounting of the cause of the death.
My rationale is two-fold. First, from a purely medical perspective, I don’t believe they are thorough enough nor independent enough to provide a definitive medical conclusion about cause of death. Second, and to reiterate the systems-thinking point above, the cause of an individual death is not the same as the cause of patterns of death (i.e., mortality) among a subset of the population. If a person with diabetes died from medical complications inside a facility, we could say that diabetes is the cause of death; but if the institutional factors surrounding the same death were predictable and preventable, we could, from a social science perspective, say that the cause of death was detention itself.
The dashboard does not attempt to assess these factors (I am not qualified to do so) nor adjudicate various causal interpretations.
We also do not repeat ICE’s assertions about the legal histories, both immigration- and criminal-related, of people who die in detention. Two factors argue against including ICE’s claims about criminal and legal history. First, the agency has not produced records that would allow us to validate and situate their claims (same principle as the medical cause of death issue above). And second, I simply refuse to participate in the indignity of suggesting, even by implication, that because someone had a criminal history, that they somehow deserved their death. Immigration detention is a form of civil administrative custody. No one is doing prison time for a crime and even if they were, detention is not a death penalty.
How is the data visualized?
Effective data visualization is mostly a process of addition through subtraction, a principle I wish more dashboard designers out there would consider (or ask their AI to consider)—which is why the current version of the site is intentionally minimalist and functional.
The central feature of the Detention Mortality Dashboard is a map that shows the locations of deaths in the dataset. The dataset currently goes back to 2018, and we will attempt to backfill information over time. As noted above, since many deaths actually occurred outside of a detention facility, the map shows the detention facility currently, or most recently, associated with the deceased.
The dashboard opens on a map of the United States, pinned only at the facilities where someone has actually died in ICE custody. We do not include every detention facility ICE operates. Each pin is color-coded to show whether the person died inside the facility itself or died elsewhere, most often at a hospital after being transferred for emergency care. Seeing that split visually, facility by facility, makes a pattern visible that’s nearly impossible to piece together from reading press releases one at a time. Hover over any pin and the available details for that person and that death appear.
The default map shows all detention deaths for the time span of data. Use the filters to narrow to specific calendar years or fiscal years, states, and whether the death took place inside or outside a detention facility. The map filters work in real time, so if you are trying to prepare the map for a screenshot (say, for a presentation or social media), you should be able to set it up how you want, then grab the image.
Below the map, a second chart, “Deaths in ICE Custody Over Time,” turns that same data into a year-by-year bar chart, toggleable between fiscal year and calendar year, with a dropdown to drill into monthly totals for any given year. If you filter on a year, the graph will change to a month-by-month graph for that year.
Scroll further down and you reach the Case Registry: a searchable, filterable table listing every case individually, by name, nationality, age, last detention facility, date of death, and, notably, the date ICE actually reported it. Having that last pair of columns side by side is the point: you can see, case by case, exactly how much time passed between a person’s death and ICE’s public acknowledgment of it.
Each case is registered on its own page with data we have on record, as well as links to the underlying source material: all Detainee Death Notifications and, when available, the detailed report. To make it easy to learn more about each facility, we link directly to the corresponding report on detentionreports.com.
How do I make a suggestion, report a mistake, or ask a question?
Feel free to reach out to me directly if you see any inaccuracies or bugs, want to share a feature request, or if you are a reporter looking for support on a story.
I’m sure we will make lots of tweaks now that the dashboard is public, so there may be minor differences between screenshots in this post and how the site looks when you view it live.
When does the data get updated?
We will maintain this dashboard for the foreseeable future, regardless of who is in the White House. When ICE publishes a new Detainee Death Notification, we add it to the dashboard as soon as the notification becomes public. More detailed Detainee Death Reports, along with any subsequent updates to existing records, are added as they become available, typically the same week. If you notice anything missing, don’t hesitate to let us know.
How will I know when the website is updated?
The best way to stay up to speed about this data is by subscribing to my Substack here, where I write about every new detained death, or follow me on pretty much any social media platform, where I will share updates. I’m on Bluesky, X, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Facebook. We do not currently have a way of subscribing to site-specific updates, but we are considering it for the future. Let me know if that would be valuable for you.
How do I see the data myself?
For anyone who’d rather work with the underlying data directly than browse case by case, there’s also a dedicated Download the Data page, sitting in the site’s navigation right between the dashboard itself and the documentation. It’s super simple: one click gets you the full dataset, along with the metadata describing what’s in it, the time span it covers, and the file’s format and size, so you know exactly what you’re getting before you download it.
