Methodology

Verification tiers

• Official record — at least one source is a government release, court filing or court order.
• Corroborated report — reported by at least two independent publishers. Syndicated copies (e.g. the same wire story on several sites) count as one publisher.
• Single-source report — one publisher only. Shown with that label; never upgraded until independent confirmation exists.

These rules are enforced in our database: a report cannot be published without a source link, cannot be labeled “corroborated” without two distinct publisher groups, and cannot be labeled “official record” without an official or court source.

Ingestion and review

A scheduled job reads public feeds (ICE newsroom, U.S. Department of Justice press releases filtered for immigration terms, and a news search feed). Items are de-duplicated by URL and placed in a private review queue. Nothing from the queue is published automatically. An editor reads the original sources, writes a neutral summary, assigns location at city/county scale, and chooses a tier.

Dates

Each event shows the event date (when it happened, per sources) and the publication date (when we published), plus a last-updated timestamp.

Location precision

We publish city and county only. We don't publish street addresses, coordinates, or real-time information, and we don't include names of detained people unless they are public officials or parties to a published court ruling.

Data dashboards

For aggregate statistics we link to the original publisher (ICE, EOIR, TRAC) instead of re-hosting numbers, so the reporting date is always the publisher's own.