Seems more like a scoreboard -- this may have the opposite effect the creators intended? The top 10 virus lists published by some vendors became that for virus writers.
Any suggestions to change that perception? My goal is to educate how significant the impact is right now with these detainments & deportations, especially on people with zero criminal history.
I'm an experienced activist and if this was my issue area I would be heartened to see this kind of work.
As a non-expert who cares about this issue, the "criminal/other" split is very clear and was the first thing I looked for.
This is very counter to the administration narrative that our country is teeming with foreign gang members, and it is presented in a chill, non-shrill, high credibility way. That's very helpful!
Some more explanation or breakdown on what types of "other" violations dominate (e.g. are these all just overstays?) might be nice, but the point is still well made. I would also like to see what percentage were felony charges/convictions if there's a significant percentage of misdemeanors.
I expect with the recent ICE funding boost and the hiring spree they're about to go on, the "criminal"/"other" ratio going to plummet as ICE climbs the s-curve. It will be very useful to have a live measure of that as it happens.
One meta point: I'm always shocked at how rare it is, for issues that are current and important in the public discourse, that someone makes a technically and visually competent, single-purpose website contributing to the debate. I have seen them to be extremely valuable on campaigns I've worked on, such as the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA site-blocking bills in 2011/2012, but it's so rare anyone makes one. Thank you for creating an exception to a generally disappointing rule!
Really appreciate these kind words, will take them to heart. I actually recently completed my PhD, and my research was in getting this kind of data for public health & building these kinds of dashboards for vaccine hesitancy from social media. I’ve always felt it’s important to present this stuff super clearly, so I’m happy to have a chance to do so on a seriously important topic like this.
Maybe it's just me, but the words, "Other Immigration Violator" rubbed me the wrong way. I see it's a term from the source data and ICE describes the category as, "Other immigration violators are individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action."
ICE alleges these people have violated the civil code so calling them "violators" assumes guilt and comes across as inflammatory. Something like like "No Criminal Status" would be accurate and more neutral.
Personally, I'd call them "Productive Members of Society The Rest of Us Depend On."
Great feedback, will work on improving the language for these categories. I agree that ICE has chosen pretty inflammatory names for these otherwise presumptively innocent detainees
You don't find it ironic at all to call the names ICE has chosen 'inflammatory', while you're here brainstorming with multiple people trying to come up with the perfect terminology, phrases, graphs to include vs not include, even the perfect colors to use in order to best impart your political ideology onto the reader?
I don’t. The data is published with a strong political bias which is morally antithetical to our legal system. The point of publishing in this way is to shed light on the human cost rather than the dehumanized political speech currently embedded within it.
Like it or not, this data is highly political. You can’t correctly interpret it in a vacuum.
You already calculate the economic impact of the loss of workers, you could reframe the detention rates based on that. Any way to obviously state, “more is worse,” is a good start.
One other suggestion would be to include, somewhere, an image or oral account of detention conditions.
You could collect oral accounts and invite people to submit them.
From the grapevine (and this makes sense because they're pushing into new numerical territory, and also don't care at all) the conditions are very crowded / harsh. You could also include accounts from family members about the kafkaesque absence of information, e.g. It's good to make the point that almost every number in this chart is a human, and a family and circle of friends, who harmed no one and is being severely harmed.
Maybe the economic impact to the top as a single line? Many people are single issue economics voters so make it clear how much this is hurting the economy. The human rights abuses are unfortunately irrelevant to many.
Also loans forgiven would be nice to see since ICE signups now get a $10K reduction. Not a large number but more to make a point.
I actually think this highlights an important point: the majority of "criminals" in the statistics are likely not to be criminals in any serious sense, and would pose no serious harm to any community whatsoever. After all, the US is a notorious over-incarcerator, and crimes are selectively enforced to keep the underclass in place (you may recall after all that the richest man in the country is an illegal immigrant).
This also underplays the current cruelty of the US system, far out of proportion with any proper policing of immigration (which obviously reasonable people can argue about). So, I don't think you're wrong exactly, and you can play the victim if you want ("I know I will be downvoted", sad violin).
Agree heavily with this. I will be adding more stats on this soon, but you can see on the map chart at the bottom that these detainees are overwhelmingly categorized (by ICE) as low or no threat level, even those convicted of minor offenses & misdemeanors. Very few are “Threat Level 1”, which are the “violent” offenders we hear so much about.
You're downvoted because you're wrong. Illegal entry can be a crime, but that's far from the only way to there the country without legal status, and last I knew visa overstays were the most common immigration violation.
Yeah just CSS color swap the gains and losses to match fidelity or your preferred broker’s website. Seeing a bold green 175% gain in 6 months would make my lizard brain instinctively say “Hell Yeah!” before I even processed what I was reading.
Yea we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
> we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
I am so tired of this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Can we please remember that the people who are being deported did, in fact, break the law? While I have empathy for people who want nothing more than to be productive citizens in the USA, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you did it the wrong way, you're subject to deportation. That's just how it goes. More than anything, I'm profoundly embarrassed that our politicians have allowed the situation to get this bad.
While I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using, do not support using immigration for weaponizing speech, and certainly wish we had a saner system of immigration, characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
I have friends who have been waiting for years to get a green card, in large part because of the consequences of years of our de facto open border situation, which have jammed the courts with "refugees" who knew that it was easier to enter the country and claim asylum than wait in line for legal immigration channels.
Edit: I have been respectful and polite in this comment, but it has now been flagged down twice (EDIT: three times). Those of you who abuse the flagging system to censor speech you do not like should be ashamed of yourselves.
> I am tired of people ignoring the US Condition. And in this context, rejecting the Due Process clause. Due Process us for all that enter the USA!
Also tired of this rhetoric. Due process is the process that is due, nothing more. It has been -- will can continue be -- redefined by the government to execute laws.
Again, I don't support everything the current administration is doing, nor do I assert that everything they are doing is legal. But that will ultimately be decided by the due process of law, which is what the term means.
Given that there are a great many trials underway concerning these questions, I am not concerned that the due process of law has disappeared.
Many of the people being rounded up did in fact come here using legal methods: the asylum process, Temporary Protected Status (which is being arbitrarily revoked). And that's not counting people with even more established credentials, like work visas, student visas, green cards.
One thing that has been helpful for me in understanding immigration is to think of this as a case where the law (an aggregation of what the public over the past several decades thinks it wants) is in conflict with what the public actually wants, as expressed by its interpersonal and economic decisions.
Americans are overall extremely happy to transact with, socialize with, be neighbors with, have children with, and educate the children of undocumented immigrants. This strong expression of what we really want (in our actual decisions) creates a powerful incentive pulling people here. Put differently, if a majority of Americans hated undocumented immigrants, impeded them at every turn, and boycotted their labor and the services of businesses that hired them, the number of people who come here would be very different.
In an analogy to tech policy, when you ask the average voter "should people have access to private communication tools that are private even against legitimate warrants under the rule of law, even in cases of serious crimes or terrorism" everyone says "no!" But if you ask them, would you like an app where your own messages are private, many people choose that app, and many engineers and major publicly traded companies choose to build such apps.
We explicitly run a society that uses multiple dueling measures of what people want, the main ones being the will of voters and peoples' choices in the marketplace. Immigration is one place where those two measures collide, and here we are.
As a result, I think it's insufficient to simply point to the law. Maybe the laws are wrong. If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws. This is an important principle in freedom-based societies.
I actually agree with most of what you said, up until the last paragraph. Specifically this part:
> If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws.
Maybe the laws are wrong -- and I disagree with many! -- but street protests and loud people on social media are not sufficient proof that we should abandon enforcement. Consider, for example, that you might be surrounded by a bubble of opinion that matches your own, while ignoring the opinion of a larger group of people who disagree with you. Or (similar to my own case), there are a large number of people who disagree who simply keep quiet, most of the time, because they don't want to be insulted, or worse.
If you don't like the laws, you can try to elect people who will change them, influence their behavior via legal speech, etc. But if your favored people don't get elected, or they otherwise ignore you, that's tough beans. We live in a republic.
The comment you originally responded to was calling out cheerful cruelty, and in response, you gave a lukewarm "I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using" in the midst of a comment otherwise defending the current administration. Consider the meaning of the phrase "praising with faint damns". Also consider that much of what the current administration is doing has nothing to do with laws, and has repeatedly targeted people who have broken no law and in fact did everything entirely legally.
You quoted the entirety of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553357 apart from the "Yea" and the period at the end, and then provided a spirited defense on behalf of the current administration, suggesting that everything's largely fine if only people would just stop breaking the law, and complaining about people who call the current administration irredeemable. You then acted surprised and annoyed that your "respectful and polite" comment was downvoted and tried to shame people for flagging it. Won't someone think of the poor beleaguered right-wing politicians who are just enforcing the law, and get called cruel and irredeemable for it?
Respectfully and politely: you are completely failing to appreciate or acknowledge the situation, and doing so helps enable the abuses that are taking place. To give a parallel example, you'd get a comparable response if you said "police only kill criminals, with a few high-profile cause celebrè exceptions; people should just stop breaking the law".
Many years ago I used to believe in the narrative of the "right way" to immigrate to the US. However after learning a lot more about the immigration process and the history of immigration in this country, I've learned that the "right way" has extremely high arbitrary barriers that are intended to keep some people out who come from some countries while allowing more from others. This is the quota system.
IMO this is a flawed application for immigration policy because it can cause some people who go the "right way" years to get through the system with one or two minor mishaps meaning you jeopardize your chance of becoming a citizen. It really shouldn't be that hard to become a citizen of this country. Immigration reform has been long discussed as the only solution to this problem, but Republican lawmakers have decided this is too good of a wedge issue to ever fully fix the problem.
So, yes, while I agree with you on the surface, where I disagree with you and this argument is that it papers over the extremely hostile, dated and ineffective policy that has largely been the source of problems for Immigration for decades that lawmakers don't seem to want to solve because it benefits their campaigns.
> characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
Setting aside the other aspects, this misses the point, in my opinion. The irredeemable part is their pride and glee in the unfortunate effects of their “enforcing our immigration laws.” Joking about alligators getting detainees, filming in their Salvadoran gulag, the “deportation ASMR” video, etc. If they were decent people who were “only” enforcing the laws, they would at least do it quietly without all the cruel grandstanding for their fans.
Agree with this 100 percent and to add further part of the reason this wasn’t dealt with is because people on both sides of the aisle know that it brings cheap labor.
Heck, even Trump wanted to make farm and hotel workers exempt until there was too much blow back.
Every other country enforces its immigration laws. There’s no good reason that we shouldn’t.
I put it in quotes, because one can claim asylum, while not actually being a refugee. And a great many people have done exactly that, knowing that it essentially guaranteed them to be released into the USA pending a trial years in the future.
In case you were wondering, this is a large part of why it takes years to get a review for something like a green card application.
Independently of political opinion, I believe your edit and anger at downvotes are due to misunderstanding the etiquette of the forum. Forum moderators have repeatedly described the culture here as "downvote without a comment is a perfectly fine way to express disagreement, but of course it would be better if you also comment".
Being undocumented in the US is a misdemeanor. How does that justify the dehumanizing rhetoric on the right, the escalating and illegal tactics ICE is employing, and the creation of literal concentration camps?
Part of the issue is that this has gone on for so long that to make any meaningful difference there needs to be a large amount of deportations in a short amount of time.
I wish we had kept up Obamas numbers instead of slacking between here and then.
His is not the only case, but is certainly a very obvious one - and that is what people are reacting too. Along with the rhetoric from the current administration that makes it plainly obvious that actual illegal behavior is neither required, not even necessarily desired, to deport someone.
The very public behavior and words of the current administration is extremely unhinged on this topic, and appears to have nothing to do with actual purposes you’re claiming it does.
You might want to re-read your comment again, because you definitely explicitly said that people being deported were being deported because they did something illegal. Full Stop.
I provided two high profile and clear examples where that is either 1) unlikely, or 2) definitely not the case, and actually absurd in context, because she is a born US citizen, and the threats the US President is leveling at her are clearly not even close to legal.
Which you continue to ignore. And which even appear to be headline examples the administration is not only creating, but persisting in making very public.
In that context, how can anyone reasonably assume that the other, less high profile, cases are being done ‘correctly’?
Fixating on a specific example that has become a cause celèbre is not a counterargument to what I said.
Even in the Garcia case, there's no dispute that the man is/was here illegally. Everything revolves around a secondary debate regarding the temporary suspension of deportation.
“He gained legal permission to remain in the United States and established a life here. But in March of 2025, Mr. Abrego Garcia would find himself unlawfully deported and detained in a Salvadoran prison with the very gang members he had fled.” [https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/]
A Immigration Judge had reviewed his situation and given him protected status. Which the Trump admin willfully ignored.
I’m not focusing on a specific example to hide the truth - I’m focusing on a clear, very public, example where the Trump admin itself is making a clear example that they’ll do everything in their (significant) power to do exactly what you are saying they won’t be doing.
So we both agree, he was deported while he was here legally.
And notably, the reason the gov’t has been giving for doing that deportation appears to not be the original illegal immigration offense you seem to think it is - but an apparently purely fictitious claim that he was in MS-13 (including a doctored photo of tattoos presented by Trump).
So to repeat, it seems quite obvious that ICE didn’t deport him because he was here illegally in the past (a Judge had prevented that previously), that he was here legally when he was deported (on a Immigration Judge’s orders even), and that the evidence presented as to why he was a member of MS-13 was clearly faked - but still presented as the truth by the President himself to the public. Ala ‘Iraq WMD’.
And the second example is the President threatening to make a born and raised US citizen stateless and ‘deport them’, which is also blatantly illegal eh? Constitutionally, that isn’t even supposed to be a thing.
The LACK of concern here is what appears to be unjustified. Are there probably completely normal and legally justified deportations still going on? I certainly hope so! But the concern here is that the President (ICE’s boss) is sending a very clear message that it is not only not required, but apparently undesirable, that these deportations be legal.
Anonymized, maybe. But the risk of crazies deanonymizing them for doing their appreciable job is still there so probably not best to store those centrally anywhere, if they're even meaningfully collected.
Yes, I have always thought cloudscape design is a great framework to build dashboards like this. Feel free to check out the source code for the whole project as an example, everything is open-source!
The data is provided by ICE in terms of financial years (FY), so I’m showing the most recent FY 2025. But they do have back to FY2019 on their site, and I plan to add that historical data soon!
I know the color scheme was probably selected to emphasize that increased ICE actions are bad, but it's weird to me to see positive percentages in red. The negative ones are kind of yellowish? I think maybe black or green for positive and red for negative would make it look more serious.
Feedback heard. I am taking the position that increased ICE detainments and lengths of detainments are bad for this dashboard, so I am going to be avoiding green for increases (as that can be interpreted as good). But I understand it can be a bit strange coloring, will consider other options
Not to denigrate the work but: I hate it and I can't fully describe why. There are no pictures of any people and barely any human element at all. There's too little context. Too much potential for it to be a scoreboard.
It's the kind of data I'd expect to see embedded in a long-form interactive report from a media outlet (with stories and pictures of what's going on etc)
Hey, totally with you on this. Others also suggested adding some anecdotes and accounts from detainees, so this will be a top priority going forward. My goal was just to get this data in front of people, so we can accurately direct our outrage. Documenting the statistics as early as possible, as I expect these numbers will continue to rise
What is the meaning of the percentage inside the “Detainee Criminal Information” pie chat? I see 71.2% nominally, then 100% whenever filters are applied.
This may just be the wrong behavior from what people expect. The center percent is just the percent that are not convinced of the selected filters. So depending on what you select, that will change.
We, in fact, do have a presumption of innocence in the US. So yes, other than those convicted of crimes, others are non-convicted detainees. These people may be detained for quite a long time, too. That is the point this dashboard is making
This is great work thank you for creating this. There a few times when technical skills can help with national discourse and this is a great example of that.
The dehumanization and persecution of immigrants by the current administration is disgusting and is immoral. I'm glad to see tech being used for good.
I find this topic rather interesting from a historical and sociopolitical one.
I’m assuming the creators of this site are attempting to make an economic argument for how Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad that the detentions are because it has “$1.49 billion” economic impact which is “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue”. But it is really a rather abusive perspective that ignores the inverse, because the inverse is that it is “$1.49 billion” that Americans are not earning and the “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue” would not have been lost if it had been Americans doing the work.
Arguably, the case could also even be made that the tax revenue would have been higher because Americans would have been paid higher wages simply due to the increased effects of the supply decline and demand that would increase wages/salaries.
Additionally, arguably, considering that official estimates are that foreign national workers of all manner send ~$150,000,000,00.00 out of the USA every year, that is also money that is not only not earned by Americans, or kept in the American economy.
No one seems to want to care about the actual American working and lower class. Why should foreign nationals that have broken the law and are being used by the ruling class to enrich themselves by lowering wages and salaries take priority over American citizens? Are we no longer doing this democracy thing? Do citizens no longer have rights in their own countries anymore; while we advocate for the “rights” of foreigners to remain in a country they did not even ask, let alone receive permission to be in?
It does not seem like that can go on indefinitely without things breaking, economically, culturally, socially. Are we just not going to care about that?
It would not be a direct substitution of American labor if these people remain deported. There’s been labor shortages in many of these industries for years, there’s reason to believe that even more money will be lost by businesses that couldn’t hire enough people. I’d love it if they raised wages, but business owners usually aren’t keen on that, and if they did they’d likely raise prices as a result. The other possibility could be bankruptcy or offshoring of these businesses. I think if anything the $1.49 billion is an underestimate of the impact.
I always like to frame it this way: ask someone what a reasonable response would be if they flew to Paris and then decided they didn’t want to leave. What is the French government allowed to do in their moral framework to enforce their immigration laws.
People don’t have a great answer. The asylum process actually works- it just turns out that many, many cases aren’t valid and it was abused to gain entry once we allowed asylum seekers to remain in country.
I’m sure some people don’t like any deportations, but I think the reason the bulk of people are upset with the current administration’s approach is its insane militarization, lack of due process, refusal to identify, apparent targeting of normal hard working people, sending people directly to foreign prisons, and sending people to war torn countries they are not from with minimal notice and no opportunity to contest.
Absolutely agree. I think the tactics and strategy are to blame here but ultimately I don’t think the administration is doing anything illegal. All cases I’ve seen where there was an alleged violation of due process were simply accelerated asylum denials with immediate deportation orders. I’m sure there have been some though, but I know local police, HSI and ERO folks that really don’t want to arrest non-criminal laborers yet are just following orders from the admin. I would be highly suspicious of any conspiracy that federal law enforcement agents are committing illegal arrests.
If it were up to me, I’d be pursuing some type of visa reform for permanent laborers that grants amnesty for those here with American citizen family members (i.e. birthright kids) as of a certain date. I’d make the asylum process occur outside of the country, signing agreements with the originating countries like Guatemala, Honduras to provide housing and food for asylum seekers while they pursue a claim.
Love to see people trying to quantify the violence of the state. Like some other comments I agree focusing on the economic impact might be a bit of a distraction, but if it helps put a stop to this then so be it...
In Utah we have a pretty powerful tool for tracking police activity that can also be applied to ICE and focuses much more on identifying cops and linking them with incidents:
https://app.copdb.org/
Yea, I want to make it as clear as possible these numbers are not a good thing, but I’m always going to lose the personal element in the numbers. But we need to know the numbers, unfortunately. They help us direct our outrage. Each of these are a person stripped away from their family for overwhelmingly no good reason
Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
These things escalate and evolve over time. The holocaust didn't suddenly happen in a vacuum or overnight. Please don't discount or normalize the danger of things like the way the right has been talking about things like "Alligator Alcatraz". Or about the insane funding ICE has received, and the additional camps they want to build.
This increase in the last 6 months is concerning, to me. Especially when we realize the vast majority, and even more so now, are non-criminal “No Threat Level”, as designated by ICE themselves. Check out the map at the bottom to see how many people with zero criminal history are being held daily in each state. It should be concerning, and I think these numbers need to be shouted from the rooftops that things are going in a bad direction here
Deporting no threat people is important as to start encouraging them to actually self deport. Without it there would be no rush and they could rely on being at the bottom of the list and stay in the US longer.
IMO, you should consider only the ICE numbers, not the CBP numbers. The CBP numbers are people being turned away at the border, which is a different category of action than arresting people already living in the US (sometimes for many years).
If you look just at the ICE numbers, the difference is much more stark: a 3.5x increase.
I do think the Web site here could do a better job of clarifying this.
I think quite a bit of the concern is the lack of due process, the jailing of people for an an indefinite period in a random country, the detention of legal permanent residents and US citizens, the willful disregard of court orders, the use of immigration as a cudgel to attack universities, defining protected speech as 'illegal' and grounds for detention, deportation, or imprisonment.
these things and others make one not like the other at all
put another way, was it really worth trashing the constitution and due process to get a 29% increase in deportation rates?
Well the law to allow deportations without due process was passed by congress under Clinton as I understand it.
The main difference with Trump up to now has sensationalization of it and pushing the legal boundaries of those immigration laws.
Trump pushing the legal bounds on due process is not too different than when Obama pushed the legality of murdering of an American citizen without due process. Except Trump sensationalizes it while Obama layered it with a vaneer of intellectualism.
It’s crazy to still use a dehumanizing term like illegals when referring to people holding up large segments of the economy while being illegally underpaid by employers. Not even in a politically correct sense, it’s such an obviously propagandized term that I’m surprised people are still gullible enough to use it.
Are you usually this concerned about negligible amounts of taxes not being collected, or only when it concerns some of the most powerless, exploited, and hardworking people in our communities?
I only ask so future historians can better understand the rhetoric used to justify the nakedly authoritarian kidnapping and imprisonment of Latinos and political opponents.
> It's hilarious that the dashboard is claiming that illegals pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else
The dashboard is explicitly not doing that. They cite, and use numbers from, research reports that explicitly estimate the taxes that illegal immigrants pay.
You can disagree with their analysis, but they are not making the assumption you are claiming they are making.
Typical ‘illegals’ (aka laborers, line workers) IF they’re paid a W2 payroll, certainly do pay taxes like everyone else. They’ll generally never be able to actually draw down that SS tax, etc. they’re paying in, however.
The SSA could easily stop this, but isn’t interested in doing so. They’ll happily go after folks trying to get payments out however.
Being paid under the table is of course different, but then that is as much the employer as anyone else eh?
I'd be in favor of a constitutional amendment which guarantees the right to vote if you're paying taxes. It's what we fought for during the revolutionary war, it ought to be law.
Considering the current political threats involve threatening to deport a born and raised US citizens because they irritate the President, I expect it may take awhile for that to be proposed.
In every country there is a $ income level where you move from a net drain on the government to a source of tax revenue. The sort of job that looks the other way to employee illegal immigrants would not be the sort of job that pays enough money to be a net benefit in tax revenue.
> Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).
Where are the criminal prosecutions if that is actually happening? For all of Elon's efforts, even he was unable to find much (if any?) social security fraud.
> Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.
With the exception of pregnancy and emergency care (which are relatively minor), this is not the case.
People get prosecuted for stealing SSN’s all the time (identity theft), just generally not for paying in taxes under said SSN. The gov’t loves free money.
Generally true - if not stolen, then they would need to lie on the SSN appliation (no permission to work, but some other approved purpose, but then use it when working). It would be easy to cross-reference SS/IRS tax records on this front too. [https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/ss5doc.htm#work2].
They have to have those stolen SSNs (or one acquired fraudulently) to get on a W2 payroll, and there is no legal way to get a SSN like that if you aren’t here legally. SS and federal programs explicitly go after anyone with those stolen SSNs if they try to withdraw funds. I imagine California is not as friendly to it either, if you really dig in. But they happily accept contributions.
And it would be trivial to modify the system so those folks couldn’t get on the payroll in the first place by requiring new employee information be submitted and verified to prevent this - last I checked it was actually explicitly illegal to do that however. Though the data is required to be kept handy in case of a raid/inspection by ICE by the employer.
I don’t think anyone is claiming being here illegally is GOOD. Rather that the system benefits from doing things that way (in the sense of illegal folks paying in, and generally unable to withdraw), and things are structured to enable this at the benefit of companies, the US gov’t, etc.
‘illegals’ as far as I can tell are definitely not sitting at home fat on SS benefits. Rather the opposite.
Seems over-focussed on the economic impact. I have never seen a museum of concentration camp victims that highlighted how much they could have made number go up.
Hey, this is super fair. I debated whether to include these numbers, but I felt it was a powerful message that, in a time when no one can afford an emergency in the US, the average detainment would be a massive cost. I understand if you feel going further and having the big number and the tax number is a bit insensitive, but my thinking was this could be a convincing common ground for conservatives who only care about $$$.
Let me know if you think I could frame it better than I am, always open to feedback
I think the lost-revenue number is important and relevant, it underlines the hypocrisy of US fascism to be claiming on the one hand to balance the books while spending billions of dollars on performative cruelty. But I do think only presenting the numbers in isolation is insufficient, and comes off a little strange. Even a little blurb at the top (this is an unprecedented failure of the rule of law, ICE agents frequently arrest people illegally, this kind of thing) would be an improvement. It isn't actually clear at face value whether you think this project is morally wrong, or just expensive.
There are some quantitative questions it would be good to clarify, too. For instance, "convicted criminal" - does this cover people convicted of real crimes, or fake ones engineered by the administration? "pending criminal charges" - are these arrests illegal or likely illegal? should they be portrayed in a hostile light, or just neutrally, as if the courts are going to find these people guilty they just haven't got to it yet. Other useful segments that are relevant include the splitting up of families, the detention of children and the vulnerable, withholding of medication and religious materials. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
Definitely keep it. If someone is focused on the humanitarian aspect of this, they're the choir. No need to preach to them. See my above comment about including some credibly-neutral description of detention conditions, including the psychological aspect of there being zero process and total chaos.
My reply seems at face value to contradict this one, but I don't actually disagree, depending on what you mean by neutral. Certainly any comment should be based in facts, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what the admin is doing both truthfully and in a non-negative light.
Yea I was gonna say: frame it in some quantifiable terms of human suffering, except half the country enthusiastically cheers for human suffering, and would also turn it into a “suffering leaderboard.” We are living in dark times.
Not a museum, but you might be interested to know that a lot of historians argue that "the industrialists" in late 1920s and 1930s Germany went along with the holocaust because for a lot of them it just meant more business, and for some free labour.
In fact if you consider the question of what's the difference between "fascism" and "authoritarianism", the answer is that fascism is a subset of authoritarianism that focuses of business.
So yes, a lot of it is about money/business/economic impact. Always has been.
Yes, certainly. The economic effect of forced labour, and its impact on the motivations of people, is historically important. I only intended to question the highlighting. A statement like "people went along with the evils of the holocaust because they were motivated by money" is one thing; "a holocaust would be good for business" is another.
I think it's hard to capture in a few numbers - it's not exactly analogous, for instance in Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War, specifically her reports from Western European theater of WW2, she could never forget that part of the stated purpose by Nazi officals for those concentration camps and other captured peoples made to work for Nazi regime in other areas was to extract maximal economic value from them while working them to death and the German people as a whole felt essentially zero impact on their day to day life and benefited from the crops and material looted from captured territories or created by those captured by the Nazis, not to mention all the valuables looted from the people sent to concentration camps in forms of their business capital/jewelry/extracted gold teeth/other personal valuables. In one sense these current day agricultural/trade workers/labor system are subsidizing a lower price of some agricultural/trade products at least in the market we had. If we had a perfect market, the labor cost should go up in their absence to attract domestic workers in hand with end product cost though this has not happened in several prior crackdowns on undocumented immigrant labor in the USA. In addition to direct citizen monetary costs we might count a.) the spending on ICE b.) the discretionary funding by executive branch to farmers/ranchers to replace lost income as happened in aftermath of Trump's first term tariff regime.
"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy." Is not even properly framed and is found nowhere in the cited report.
Predictions of when you will die need a range in order to be attached to a number like accuracy. The attached report is not about this but about population-level mortality trends.
Seems more like a scoreboard -- this may have the opposite effect the creators intended? The top 10 virus lists published by some vendors became that for virus writers.
Any suggestions to change that perception? My goal is to educate how significant the impact is right now with these detainments & deportations, especially on people with zero criminal history.
I'm an experienced activist and if this was my issue area I would be heartened to see this kind of work.
As a non-expert who cares about this issue, the "criminal/other" split is very clear and was the first thing I looked for.
This is very counter to the administration narrative that our country is teeming with foreign gang members, and it is presented in a chill, non-shrill, high credibility way. That's very helpful!
Some more explanation or breakdown on what types of "other" violations dominate (e.g. are these all just overstays?) might be nice, but the point is still well made. I would also like to see what percentage were felony charges/convictions if there's a significant percentage of misdemeanors.
I expect with the recent ICE funding boost and the hiring spree they're about to go on, the "criminal"/"other" ratio going to plummet as ICE climbs the s-curve. It will be very useful to have a live measure of that as it happens.
One meta point: I'm always shocked at how rare it is, for issues that are current and important in the public discourse, that someone makes a technically and visually competent, single-purpose website contributing to the debate. I have seen them to be extremely valuable on campaigns I've worked on, such as the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA site-blocking bills in 2011/2012, but it's so rare anyone makes one. Thank you for creating an exception to a generally disappointing rule!
Really appreciate these kind words, will take them to heart. I actually recently completed my PhD, and my research was in getting this kind of data for public health & building these kinds of dashboards for vaccine hesitancy from social media. I’ve always felt it’s important to present this stuff super clearly, so I’m happy to have a chance to do so on a seriously important topic like this.
Maybe it's just me, but the words, "Other Immigration Violator" rubbed me the wrong way. I see it's a term from the source data and ICE describes the category as, "Other immigration violators are individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action."
ICE alleges these people have violated the civil code so calling them "violators" assumes guilt and comes across as inflammatory. Something like like "No Criminal Status" would be accurate and more neutral.
Personally, I'd call them "Productive Members of Society The Rest of Us Depend On."
Great feedback, will work on improving the language for these categories. I agree that ICE has chosen pretty inflammatory names for these otherwise presumptively innocent detainees
You don't find it ironic at all to call the names ICE has chosen 'inflammatory', while you're here brainstorming with multiple people trying to come up with the perfect terminology, phrases, graphs to include vs not include, even the perfect colors to use in order to best impart your political ideology onto the reader?
I don’t. The data is published with a strong political bias which is morally antithetical to our legal system. The point of publishing in this way is to shed light on the human cost rather than the dehumanized political speech currently embedded within it.
Like it or not, this data is highly political. You can’t correctly interpret it in a vacuum.
> I'd call them "Productive Members of Society The Rest of Us Depend On.”
This is only useful for in-group messaging.
You already calculate the economic impact of the loss of workers, you could reframe the detention rates based on that. Any way to obviously state, “more is worse,” is a good start.
Also, if you can manage to get the amount of funds used by ICE/CBP per period then you can also show how much is being sunk into this process too.
Great ideas, I will look into getting this data into the stats. Thanks!
One other suggestion would be to include, somewhere, an image or oral account of detention conditions.
You could collect oral accounts and invite people to submit them.
From the grapevine (and this makes sense because they're pushing into new numerical territory, and also don't care at all) the conditions are very crowded / harsh. You could also include accounts from family members about the kafkaesque absence of information, e.g. It's good to make the point that almost every number in this chart is a human, and a family and circle of friends, who harmed no one and is being severely harmed.
This is a great idea, will start to curate existing accounts & find a way to show alongside. Thanks!
I don’t imagine left-leaning people will cheer on the loss of cheap labour for millionaires.
Maybe the economic impact to the top as a single line? Many people are single issue economics voters so make it clear how much this is hurting the economy. The human rights abuses are unfortunately irrelevant to many.
Also loans forgiven would be nice to see since ICE signups now get a $10K reduction. Not a large number but more to make a point.
One thing to do is to focus on the negative impacts.
Number of children separated from Families.
Number of US citizens illegally detained.
Number of lawsuits against ICE.
Cost of ICE vs each Detainee.
Agree on all of these. Let me know if you know of any good sources of data for these numbers, I am actively looking to add them.
I know I will be downvoted but technically, they did commit a crime by coming here illegally.
I actually think this highlights an important point: the majority of "criminals" in the statistics are likely not to be criminals in any serious sense, and would pose no serious harm to any community whatsoever. After all, the US is a notorious over-incarcerator, and crimes are selectively enforced to keep the underclass in place (you may recall after all that the richest man in the country is an illegal immigrant).
This also underplays the current cruelty of the US system, far out of proportion with any proper policing of immigration (which obviously reasonable people can argue about). So, I don't think you're wrong exactly, and you can play the victim if you want ("I know I will be downvoted", sad violin).
Agree heavily with this. I will be adding more stats on this soon, but you can see on the map chart at the bottom that these detainees are overwhelmingly categorized (by ICE) as low or no threat level, even those convicted of minor offenses & misdemeanors. Very few are “Threat Level 1”, which are the “violent” offenders we hear so much about.
You're downvoted because you're wrong. Illegal entry can be a crime, but that's far from the only way to there the country without legal status, and last I knew visa overstays were the most common immigration violation.
Is visa overstay not a crime?
It is not, it's a separate type of offense called a civil infraction, which is akin to a parking ticket or vehicle moving violation.
Yeah just CSS color swap the gains and losses to match fidelity or your preferred broker’s website. Seeing a bold green 175% gain in 6 months would make my lizard brain instinctively say “Hell Yeah!” before I even processed what I was reading.
Good old "If you don't like the data change the presentation"
[flagged]
Yea we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
> we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
I am so tired of this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Can we please remember that the people who are being deported did, in fact, break the law? While I have empathy for people who want nothing more than to be productive citizens in the USA, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you did it the wrong way, you're subject to deportation. That's just how it goes. More than anything, I'm profoundly embarrassed that our politicians have allowed the situation to get this bad.
While I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using, do not support using immigration for weaponizing speech, and certainly wish we had a saner system of immigration, characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
I have friends who have been waiting for years to get a green card, in large part because of the consequences of years of our de facto open border situation, which have jammed the courts with "refugees" who knew that it was easier to enter the country and claim asylum than wait in line for legal immigration channels.
Edit: I have been respectful and polite in this comment, but it has now been flagged down twice (EDIT: three times). Those of you who abuse the flagging system to censor speech you do not like should be ashamed of yourselves.
I am tired of people ignoring the US Condition. And in this context, rejecting the Due Process clause. Due Process us for all that enter the USA!
Once the Government can start ignore the Constitution it is meaningless and there us no more USA.
We are ALL bound to it or no one is!
> I am tired of people ignoring the US Condition. And in this context, rejecting the Due Process clause. Due Process us for all that enter the USA!
Also tired of this rhetoric. Due process is the process that is due, nothing more. It has been -- will can continue be -- redefined by the government to execute laws.
Again, I don't support everything the current administration is doing, nor do I assert that everything they are doing is legal. But that will ultimately be decided by the due process of law, which is what the term means.
Given that there are a great many trials underway concerning these questions, I am not concerned that the due process of law has disappeared.
Many of the people being rounded up did in fact come here using legal methods: the asylum process, Temporary Protected Status (which is being arbitrarily revoked). And that's not counting people with even more established credentials, like work visas, student visas, green cards.
I made it very clear that I don't support everything the current administration is doing. I still support the enforcement of our laws.
One thing that has been helpful for me in understanding immigration is to think of this as a case where the law (an aggregation of what the public over the past several decades thinks it wants) is in conflict with what the public actually wants, as expressed by its interpersonal and economic decisions.
Americans are overall extremely happy to transact with, socialize with, be neighbors with, have children with, and educate the children of undocumented immigrants. This strong expression of what we really want (in our actual decisions) creates a powerful incentive pulling people here. Put differently, if a majority of Americans hated undocumented immigrants, impeded them at every turn, and boycotted their labor and the services of businesses that hired them, the number of people who come here would be very different.
In an analogy to tech policy, when you ask the average voter "should people have access to private communication tools that are private even against legitimate warrants under the rule of law, even in cases of serious crimes or terrorism" everyone says "no!" But if you ask them, would you like an app where your own messages are private, many people choose that app, and many engineers and major publicly traded companies choose to build such apps.
We explicitly run a society that uses multiple dueling measures of what people want, the main ones being the will of voters and peoples' choices in the marketplace. Immigration is one place where those two measures collide, and here we are.
As a result, I think it's insufficient to simply point to the law. Maybe the laws are wrong. If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws. This is an important principle in freedom-based societies.
I actually agree with most of what you said, up until the last paragraph. Specifically this part:
> If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws.
Maybe the laws are wrong -- and I disagree with many! -- but street protests and loud people on social media are not sufficient proof that we should abandon enforcement. Consider, for example, that you might be surrounded by a bubble of opinion that matches your own, while ignoring the opinion of a larger group of people who disagree with you. Or (similar to my own case), there are a large number of people who disagree who simply keep quiet, most of the time, because they don't want to be insulted, or worse.
If you don't like the laws, you can try to elect people who will change them, influence their behavior via legal speech, etc. But if your favored people don't get elected, or they otherwise ignore you, that's tough beans. We live in a republic.
The comment you originally responded to was calling out cheerful cruelty, and in response, you gave a lukewarm "I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using" in the midst of a comment otherwise defending the current administration. Consider the meaning of the phrase "praising with faint damns". Also consider that much of what the current administration is doing has nothing to do with laws, and has repeatedly targeted people who have broken no law and in fact did everything entirely legally.
I quoted the part of the comment I was responding to.
You quoted the entirety of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553357 apart from the "Yea" and the period at the end, and then provided a spirited defense on behalf of the current administration, suggesting that everything's largely fine if only people would just stop breaking the law, and complaining about people who call the current administration irredeemable. You then acted surprised and annoyed that your "respectful and polite" comment was downvoted and tried to shame people for flagging it. Won't someone think of the poor beleaguered right-wing politicians who are just enforcing the law, and get called cruel and irredeemable for it?
Respectfully and politely: you are completely failing to appreciate or acknowledge the situation, and doing so helps enable the abuses that are taking place. To give a parallel example, you'd get a comparable response if you said "police only kill criminals, with a few high-profile cause celebrè exceptions; people should just stop breaking the law".
Many years ago I used to believe in the narrative of the "right way" to immigrate to the US. However after learning a lot more about the immigration process and the history of immigration in this country, I've learned that the "right way" has extremely high arbitrary barriers that are intended to keep some people out who come from some countries while allowing more from others. This is the quota system.
IMO this is a flawed application for immigration policy because it can cause some people who go the "right way" years to get through the system with one or two minor mishaps meaning you jeopardize your chance of becoming a citizen. It really shouldn't be that hard to become a citizen of this country. Immigration reform has been long discussed as the only solution to this problem, but Republican lawmakers have decided this is too good of a wedge issue to ever fully fix the problem.
So, yes, while I agree with you on the surface, where I disagree with you and this argument is that it papers over the extremely hostile, dated and ineffective policy that has largely been the source of problems for Immigration for decades that lawmakers don't seem to want to solve because it benefits their campaigns.
> characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
Setting aside the other aspects, this misses the point, in my opinion. The irredeemable part is their pride and glee in the unfortunate effects of their “enforcing our immigration laws.” Joking about alligators getting detainees, filming in their Salvadoran gulag, the “deportation ASMR” video, etc. If they were decent people who were “only” enforcing the laws, they would at least do it quietly without all the cruel grandstanding for their fans.
Agree with this 100 percent and to add further part of the reason this wasn’t dealt with is because people on both sides of the aisle know that it brings cheap labor.
Heck, even Trump wanted to make farm and hotel workers exempt until there was too much blow back.
Every other country enforces its immigration laws. There’s no good reason that we shouldn’t.
Putting 'Refugees' in quotes?
Applying for asylum IS a legal immigration channel.
Maybe you should look in the mirror about who should be ashamed of themselves
I put it in quotes, because one can claim asylum, while not actually being a refugee. And a great many people have done exactly that, knowing that it essentially guaranteed them to be released into the USA pending a trial years in the future.
In case you were wondering, this is a large part of why it takes years to get a review for something like a green card application.
Independently of political opinion, I believe your edit and anger at downvotes are due to misunderstanding the etiquette of the forum. Forum moderators have repeatedly described the culture here as "downvote without a comment is a perfectly fine way to express disagreement, but of course it would be better if you also comment".
Downvoting is fine. I expect it. The comment was flagged down twice in a row, each time in under 20s.
I can virtually guarantee that it will be flagged down again once I stop paying attention.
Edit: sure enough, the comment was flagged down again.
Being undocumented in the US is a misdemeanor. How does that justify the dehumanizing rhetoric on the right, the escalating and illegal tactics ICE is employing, and the creation of literal concentration camps?
I said nothing about criminal vs. misdemeanor. If you violate immigration laws, you can be deported.
I feel like you're missing something crucially important if you see what is happening as just "enforcement of immigration laws".
Part of the issue is that this has gone on for so long that to make any meaningful difference there needs to be a large amount of deportations in a short amount of time.
I wish we had kept up Obamas numbers instead of slacking between here and then.
What crimes did Abrego Garcia commit again? [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k4072e3nno]
His is not the only case, but is certainly a very obvious one - and that is what people are reacting too. Along with the rhetoric from the current administration that makes it plainly obvious that actual illegal behavior is neither required, not even necessarily desired, to deport someone.
Like Trump’s threats against Rosie O’Donnell for what should be straightforward protected political speech. [https://time.com/7301997/trump-threat-us-citizenship-revoke-...]
The very public behavior and words of the current administration is extremely unhinged on this topic, and appears to have nothing to do with actual purposes you’re claiming it does.
I made it very clear that I don't support everything our administration is doing.
You might want to re-read your comment again, because you definitely explicitly said that people being deported were being deported because they did something illegal. Full Stop.
I provided two high profile and clear examples where that is either 1) unlikely, or 2) definitely not the case, and actually absurd in context, because she is a born US citizen, and the threats the US President is leveling at her are clearly not even close to legal.
Which you continue to ignore. And which even appear to be headline examples the administration is not only creating, but persisting in making very public.
In that context, how can anyone reasonably assume that the other, less high profile, cases are being done ‘correctly’?
> Can we please remember that the people who are being deported did, in fact, break the law?
Fixating on a specific example that has become a cause celèbre is not a counterargument to what I said.
Even in the Garcia case, there's no dispute that the man is/was here illegally. Everything revolves around a secondary debate regarding the temporary suspension of deportation.
He was here legally.
“He gained legal permission to remain in the United States and established a life here. But in March of 2025, Mr. Abrego Garcia would find himself unlawfully deported and detained in a Salvadoran prison with the very gang members he had fled.” [https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/]
A Immigration Judge had reviewed his situation and given him protected status. Which the Trump admin willfully ignored.
I’m not focusing on a specific example to hide the truth - I’m focusing on a clear, very public, example where the Trump admin itself is making a clear example that they’ll do everything in their (significant) power to do exactly what you are saying they won’t be doing.
And which you keep refusing to acknowledge.
From the article you posted:
"Mr Abrego Garcia has acknowledged entering the US illegally in 2012, according to court documents" [1]
He was currently here legally, only in the sense that a court had previously suspended his deportation.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1396906/dl?inline
So we both agree, he was deported while he was here legally.
And notably, the reason the gov’t has been giving for doing that deportation appears to not be the original illegal immigration offense you seem to think it is - but an apparently purely fictitious claim that he was in MS-13 (including a doctored photo of tattoos presented by Trump).
So to repeat, it seems quite obvious that ICE didn’t deport him because he was here illegally in the past (a Judge had prevented that previously), that he was here legally when he was deported (on a Immigration Judge’s orders even), and that the evidence presented as to why he was a member of MS-13 was clearly faked - but still presented as the truth by the President himself to the public. Ala ‘Iraq WMD’.
And the second example is the President threatening to make a born and raised US citizen stateless and ‘deport them’, which is also blatantly illegal eh? Constitutionally, that isn’t even supposed to be a thing.
The LACK of concern here is what appears to be unjustified. Are there probably completely normal and legally justified deportations still going on? I certainly hope so! But the concern here is that the President (ICE’s boss) is sending a very clear message that it is not only not required, but apparently undesirable, that these deportations be legal.
I'd like to see this breakdown of ICE employees themselves. If they're "public servants", is this data also public?
Anonymized, maybe. But the risk of crazies deanonymizing them for doing their appreciable job is still there so probably not best to store those centrally anywhere, if they're even meaningfully collected.
Making the bullies afraid is a good thing.
Curiously they used AWS' design system https://cloudscape.design/
Yes, I have always thought cloudscape design is a great framework to build dashboards like this. Feel free to check out the source code for the whole project as an example, everything is open-source!
Why do the data only go back to October 2024? It would be great to be able to see the longer term trends.
The data is provided by ICE in terms of financial years (FY), so I’m showing the most recent FY 2025. But they do have back to FY2019 on their site, and I plan to add that historical data soon!
I know the color scheme was probably selected to emphasize that increased ICE actions are bad, but it's weird to me to see positive percentages in red. The negative ones are kind of yellowish? I think maybe black or green for positive and red for negative would make it look more serious.
Feedback heard. I am taking the position that increased ICE detainments and lengths of detainments are bad for this dashboard, so I am going to be avoiding green for increases (as that can be interpreted as good). But I understand it can be a bit strange coloring, will consider other options
Not to denigrate the work but: I hate it and I can't fully describe why. There are no pictures of any people and barely any human element at all. There's too little context. Too much potential for it to be a scoreboard.
It's the kind of data I'd expect to see embedded in a long-form interactive report from a media outlet (with stories and pictures of what's going on etc)
Hey, totally with you on this. Others also suggested adding some anecdotes and accounts from detainees, so this will be a top priority going forward. My goal was just to get this data in front of people, so we can accurately direct our outrage. Documenting the statistics as early as possible, as I expect these numbers will continue to rise
What is the meaning of the percentage inside the “Detainee Criminal Information” pie chat? I see 71.2% nominally, then 100% whenever filters are applied.
This may just be the wrong behavior from what people expect. The center percent is just the percent that are not convinced of the selected filters. So depending on what you select, that will change.
Sorry… what does “the percent that are not convinced of the selected filters” mean?
Could you specifically explain what that 71.2% figure is?
Edit: Ah, if you hold your phone rotated the label “Not Convicted” appears. That is… a very odd way of spinning this data.
We, in fact, do have a presumption of innocence in the US. So yes, other than those convicted of crimes, others are non-convicted detainees. These people may be detained for quite a long time, too. That is the point this dashboard is making
I understand the intended spin. The claim is that it’s implantation is heavy handed and half baked.
This is great work thank you for creating this. There a few times when technical skills can help with national discourse and this is a great example of that.
The dehumanization and persecution of immigrants by the current administration is disgusting and is immoral. I'm glad to see tech being used for good.
I find this topic rather interesting from a historical and sociopolitical one.
I’m assuming the creators of this site are attempting to make an economic argument for how Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad that the detentions are because it has “$1.49 billion” economic impact which is “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue”. But it is really a rather abusive perspective that ignores the inverse, because the inverse is that it is “$1.49 billion” that Americans are not earning and the “$438.10 million annually in lost tax revenue” would not have been lost if it had been Americans doing the work.
Arguably, the case could also even be made that the tax revenue would have been higher because Americans would have been paid higher wages simply due to the increased effects of the supply decline and demand that would increase wages/salaries.
Additionally, arguably, considering that official estimates are that foreign national workers of all manner send ~$150,000,000,00.00 out of the USA every year, that is also money that is not only not earned by Americans, or kept in the American economy.
No one seems to want to care about the actual American working and lower class. Why should foreign nationals that have broken the law and are being used by the ruling class to enrich themselves by lowering wages and salaries take priority over American citizens? Are we no longer doing this democracy thing? Do citizens no longer have rights in their own countries anymore; while we advocate for the “rights” of foreigners to remain in a country they did not even ask, let alone receive permission to be in?
It does not seem like that can go on indefinitely without things breaking, economically, culturally, socially. Are we just not going to care about that?
It would not be a direct substitution of American labor if these people remain deported. There’s been labor shortages in many of these industries for years, there’s reason to believe that even more money will be lost by businesses that couldn’t hire enough people. I’d love it if they raised wages, but business owners usually aren’t keen on that, and if they did they’d likely raise prices as a result. The other possibility could be bankruptcy or offshoring of these businesses. I think if anything the $1.49 billion is an underestimate of the impact.
I always like to frame it this way: ask someone what a reasonable response would be if they flew to Paris and then decided they didn’t want to leave. What is the French government allowed to do in their moral framework to enforce their immigration laws.
People don’t have a great answer. The asylum process actually works- it just turns out that many, many cases aren’t valid and it was abused to gain entry once we allowed asylum seekers to remain in country.
I’m sure some people don’t like any deportations, but I think the reason the bulk of people are upset with the current administration’s approach is its insane militarization, lack of due process, refusal to identify, apparent targeting of normal hard working people, sending people directly to foreign prisons, and sending people to war torn countries they are not from with minimal notice and no opportunity to contest.
Not that deportations are happening.
Absolutely agree. I think the tactics and strategy are to blame here but ultimately I don’t think the administration is doing anything illegal. All cases I’ve seen where there was an alleged violation of due process were simply accelerated asylum denials with immediate deportation orders. I’m sure there have been some though, but I know local police, HSI and ERO folks that really don’t want to arrest non-criminal laborers yet are just following orders from the admin. I would be highly suspicious of any conspiracy that federal law enforcement agents are committing illegal arrests.
If it were up to me, I’d be pursuing some type of visa reform for permanent laborers that grants amnesty for those here with American citizen family members (i.e. birthright kids) as of a certain date. I’d make the asylum process occur outside of the country, signing agreements with the originating countries like Guatemala, Honduras to provide housing and food for asylum seekers while they pursue a claim.
My answer would depend strongly on where the person is from and what their circumstances are like there.
> the inverse is that it is “$1.49 billion” that Americans are not earning
This is only true if there are an equivalent number of unemployed Americans willing to work the same jobs for the same wage located in the same areas.
Love to see people trying to quantify the violence of the state. Like some other comments I agree focusing on the economic impact might be a bit of a distraction, but if it helps put a stop to this then so be it...
In Utah we have a pretty powerful tool for tracking police activity that can also be applied to ICE and focuses much more on identifying cops and linking them with incidents: https://app.copdb.org/
Yea, I want to make it as clear as possible these numbers are not a good thing, but I’m always going to lose the personal element in the numbers. But we need to know the numbers, unfortunately. They help us direct our outrage. Each of these are a person stripped away from their family for overwhelmingly no good reason
Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
These things escalate and evolve over time. The holocaust didn't suddenly happen in a vacuum or overnight. Please don't discount or normalize the danger of things like the way the right has been talking about things like "Alligator Alcatraz". Or about the insane funding ICE has received, and the additional camps they want to build.
That kind of slippery slope is so silly it could be as well applied to IRS.
So we went from just shy of 25000/mo under Biden to 35000/mo under Trump and supposedly this is just unbelievably over-the-top?
This increase in the last 6 months is concerning, to me. Especially when we realize the vast majority, and even more so now, are non-criminal “No Threat Level”, as designated by ICE themselves. Check out the map at the bottom to see how many people with zero criminal history are being held daily in each state. It should be concerning, and I think these numbers need to be shouted from the rooftops that things are going in a bad direction here
Deporting no threat people is important as to start encouraging them to actually self deport. Without it there would be no rush and they could rely on being at the bottom of the list and stay in the US longer.
The whole effort economically is about as important and urgent as paying somebody to key your own car or punch you in the face.
If your choices are between being punched in the face or punched in the face and given $1000 it seems natural to pick the latter.
IMO, you should consider only the ICE numbers, not the CBP numbers. The CBP numbers are people being turned away at the border, which is a different category of action than arresting people already living in the US (sometimes for many years).
If you look just at the ICE numbers, the difference is much more stark: a 3.5x increase.
I do think the Web site here could do a better job of clarifying this.
I think quite a bit of the concern is the lack of due process, the jailing of people for an an indefinite period in a random country, the detention of legal permanent residents and US citizens, the willful disregard of court orders, the use of immigration as a cudgel to attack universities, defining protected speech as 'illegal' and grounds for detention, deportation, or imprisonment.
these things and others make one not like the other at all
put another way, was it really worth trashing the constitution and due process to get a 29% increase in deportation rates?
Well the law to allow deportations without due process was passed by congress under Clinton as I understand it.
The main difference with Trump up to now has sensationalization of it and pushing the legal boundaries of those immigration laws.
Trump pushing the legal bounds on due process is not too different than when Obama pushed the legality of murdering of an American citizen without due process. Except Trump sensationalizes it while Obama layered it with a vaneer of intellectualism.
The concern has never, ever been about amount. It's always been about the methods that employ violence and a disruption of the social order.
Under Trump, the agency in question now has an annual budget on the scale of the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project.
So: what do you think is about to happen?
In case you missed it, congress just gave ICE an unprecedented $175 billion. They want this to escalate much, much further.
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It’s crazy to still use a dehumanizing term like illegals when referring to people holding up large segments of the economy while being illegally underpaid by employers. Not even in a politically correct sense, it’s such an obviously propagandized term that I’m surprised people are still gullible enough to use it.
Are you usually this concerned about negligible amounts of taxes not being collected, or only when it concerns some of the most powerless, exploited, and hardworking people in our communities?
I only ask so future historians can better understand the rhetoric used to justify the nakedly authoritarian kidnapping and imprisonment of Latinos and political opponents.
> It's hilarious that the dashboard is claiming that illegals pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else
The dashboard is explicitly not doing that. They cite, and use numbers from, research reports that explicitly estimate the taxes that illegal immigrants pay.
You can disagree with their analysis, but they are not making the assumption you are claiming they are making.
I don’t actually see the where the dashboard claims that the average tax rate is the same as the larger population.
The dashboard does say that undocumented immigrants pay
> an average tax revenue rate of 29.5%, supported by various sources [3, 4, 5, 6]
without saying anything about the average tax rate for the whole population.
Typical ‘illegals’ (aka laborers, line workers) IF they’re paid a W2 payroll, certainly do pay taxes like everyone else. They’ll generally never be able to actually draw down that SS tax, etc. they’re paying in, however.
The SSA could easily stop this, but isn’t interested in doing so. They’ll happily go after folks trying to get payments out however.
Being paid under the table is of course different, but then that is as much the employer as anyone else eh?
I'd be in favor of a constitutional amendment which guarantees the right to vote if you're paying taxes. It's what we fought for during the revolutionary war, it ought to be law.
Considering the current political threats involve threatening to deport a born and raised US citizens because they irritate the President, I expect it may take awhile for that to be proposed.
Agreed, it's for when the pendulum is on the other side.
In every country there is a $ income level where you move from a net drain on the government to a source of tax revenue. The sort of job that looks the other way to employee illegal immigrants would not be the sort of job that pays enough money to be a net benefit in tax revenue.
That would be accurate, if those immigrants could access benefits in order to be a drain on the government. They can't.
Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).
Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.
> Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).
Where are the criminal prosecutions if that is actually happening? For all of Elon's efforts, even he was unable to find much (if any?) social security fraud.
> Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.
With the exception of pregnancy and emergency care (which are relatively minor), this is not the case.
People get prosecuted for stealing SSN’s all the time (identity theft), just generally not for paying in taxes under said SSN. The gov’t loves free money.
Generally true - if not stolen, then they would need to lie on the SSN appliation (no permission to work, but some other approved purpose, but then use it when working). It would be easy to cross-reference SS/IRS tax records on this front too. [https://www.ssa.gov/ssnumber/ss5doc.htm#work2].
They have to have those stolen SSNs (or one acquired fraudulently) to get on a W2 payroll, and there is no legal way to get a SSN like that if you aren’t here legally. SS and federal programs explicitly go after anyone with those stolen SSNs if they try to withdraw funds. I imagine California is not as friendly to it either, if you really dig in. But they happily accept contributions.
And it would be trivial to modify the system so those folks couldn’t get on the payroll in the first place by requiring new employee information be submitted and verified to prevent this - last I checked it was actually explicitly illegal to do that however. Though the data is required to be kept handy in case of a raid/inspection by ICE by the employer.
I don’t think anyone is claiming being here illegally is GOOD. Rather that the system benefits from doing things that way (in the sense of illegal folks paying in, and generally unable to withdraw), and things are structured to enable this at the benefit of companies, the US gov’t, etc.
‘illegals’ as far as I can tell are definitely not sitting at home fat on SS benefits. Rather the opposite.
Referencing 'videos by contractors' as your evidence suggests an embarrassing relationship to epistemology in the era of sociometrics.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topic/tax-contrib...
Seems over-focussed on the economic impact. I have never seen a museum of concentration camp victims that highlighted how much they could have made number go up.
Hey, this is super fair. I debated whether to include these numbers, but I felt it was a powerful message that, in a time when no one can afford an emergency in the US, the average detainment would be a massive cost. I understand if you feel going further and having the big number and the tax number is a bit insensitive, but my thinking was this could be a convincing common ground for conservatives who only care about $$$.
Let me know if you think I could frame it better than I am, always open to feedback
I think the lost-revenue number is important and relevant, it underlines the hypocrisy of US fascism to be claiming on the one hand to balance the books while spending billions of dollars on performative cruelty. But I do think only presenting the numbers in isolation is insufficient, and comes off a little strange. Even a little blurb at the top (this is an unprecedented failure of the rule of law, ICE agents frequently arrest people illegally, this kind of thing) would be an improvement. It isn't actually clear at face value whether you think this project is morally wrong, or just expensive.
There are some quantitative questions it would be good to clarify, too. For instance, "convicted criminal" - does this cover people convicted of real crimes, or fake ones engineered by the administration? "pending criminal charges" - are these arrests illegal or likely illegal? should they be portrayed in a hostile light, or just neutrally, as if the courts are going to find these people guilty they just haven't got to it yet. Other useful segments that are relevant include the splitting up of families, the detention of children and the vulnerable, withholding of medication and religious materials. Unfortunately, the list goes on.
Great feedback, will work on this. Much of the language is from ICE in their released statistics, which is why it is vague. Will improve this for sure
Definitely keep it. If someone is focused on the humanitarian aspect of this, they're the choir. No need to preach to them. See my above comment about including some credibly-neutral description of detention conditions, including the psychological aspect of there being zero process and total chaos.
My reply seems at face value to contradict this one, but I don't actually disagree, depending on what you mean by neutral. Certainly any comment should be based in facts, but I would be hard-pressed to describe what the admin is doing both truthfully and in a non-negative light.
Yea I was gonna say: frame it in some quantifiable terms of human suffering, except half the country enthusiastically cheers for human suffering, and would also turn it into a “suffering leaderboard.” We are living in dark times.
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Not a museum, but you might be interested to know that a lot of historians argue that "the industrialists" in late 1920s and 1930s Germany went along with the holocaust because for a lot of them it just meant more business, and for some free labour.
In fact if you consider the question of what's the difference between "fascism" and "authoritarianism", the answer is that fascism is a subset of authoritarianism that focuses of business.
So yes, a lot of it is about money/business/economic impact. Always has been.
Yes, certainly. The economic effect of forced labour, and its impact on the motivations of people, is historically important. I only intended to question the highlighting. A statement like "people went along with the evils of the holocaust because they were motivated by money" is one thing; "a holocaust would be good for business" is another.
I think it's hard to capture in a few numbers - it's not exactly analogous, for instance in Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War, specifically her reports from Western European theater of WW2, she could never forget that part of the stated purpose by Nazi officals for those concentration camps and other captured peoples made to work for Nazi regime in other areas was to extract maximal economic value from them while working them to death and the German people as a whole felt essentially zero impact on their day to day life and benefited from the crops and material looted from captured territories or created by those captured by the Nazis, not to mention all the valuables looted from the people sent to concentration camps in forms of their business capital/jewelry/extracted gold teeth/other personal valuables. In one sense these current day agricultural/trade workers/labor system are subsidizing a lower price of some agricultural/trade products at least in the market we had. If we had a perfect market, the labor cost should go up in their absence to attract domestic workers in hand with end product cost though this has not happened in several prior crackdowns on undocumented immigrant labor in the USA. In addition to direct citizen monetary costs we might count a.) the spending on ICE b.) the discretionary funding by executive branch to farmers/ranchers to replace lost income as happened in aftermath of Trump's first term tariff regime.
Those are rookie numbers, got to pump them up!
So you're essentially trying to increase the negative economic impact, not to mention the inhumane treatment.
This blog post is flawed.
"Life insurers can predict when you'll die with about 98% accuracy." Is not even properly framed and is found nowhere in the cited report.
Predictions of when you will die need a range in order to be attached to a number like accuracy. The attached report is not about this but about population-level mortality trends.
I think you posted on the wrong article. I do not believe I included any life insurance claims in this dashboard