The Civic Node

Deportation Data Project

2 min read

Overview

The Deportation Data Project (deportationdata.org) is an academic-led effort that obtains, cleans, and publishes the federal government’s own immigration-enforcement data through Freedom of Information Act litigation. It is the reason the public knows what Operation Metro Surge actually did, as opposed to what DHS said it did: the project forced release of ICE’s record-level arrest data, which newsrooms then analyzed to produce the population-level demographics DHS never volunteered.

Key Facts

  • Academic-led; co-director Graeme Blair (UCLA political scientist). Obtains ICE/CBP data via FOIA requests and lawsuits, then posts machine-readable datasets for journalists and researchers.
  • The Metro Surge dataset it released carried per-arrest fields (age, nationality, date, location, ICE’s conviction/pending-charge flags, and an ICE “collateral” flag) but no names and no legal-status field, and excludes U.S. citizens entirely (per a 2021 GAO finding, ICE does not systematically track citizen arrests).
  • Its data is the common source under at least four independent Metro Surge analyses: MPR News — Three-Quarters of Metro Surge Arrestees Had No Criminal Record - 2026-03-31 (APM Reports), Minnesota Reformer — More Than 3,700 Arrested in Metro Surge Per New Data - 2026-03-31, The Intercept, and CBS Minnesota.
  • ICE’s rebuttal: ICE called the project “not accurate,” arguing its releases are “information releases that have not been reviewed, audited or given context” — while offering no alternative dataset of its own.

Newsletter Relevance

The project is the structural counter to Enforcement Theater: where DHS controls the narrative by controlling disclosure (~11% of arrests publicized; see I Mapped Every Confirmed ICE Arrest in Minnesota Heres What I Found), FOIA litigation pries loose the full population record. It is also a clean illustration that the accountability infrastructure for federal enforcement increasingly lives outside government — in universities, newsrooms, and civil-society litigation — precisely because the internal mechanisms (Touhy Doctrine, DHS oversight offices) have been disabled or weaponized.

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