Sources & methodology

Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act lets ICE delegate certain federal immigration powers to local officers. An agreement here means this agency signed a memorandum with ICE. The model matters: a Jail Enforcement Model agreement operates on people already booked into a local jail; a Warrant Service Officer agreement lets designated officers serve ICE administrative warrants on people in custody; a Task Force Model agreement extends immigration enforcement into everyday street-level policing. This record describes the agency and its contract — not any person it has encountered.

An automated licence plate reader photographs every passing vehicle, converts the plate to text, and stores it with a time and location. Networks of these cameras let an agency reconstruct where a vehicle has travelled over weeks or months, and many networks are searchable by outside agencies. This is a transparency tool showing where infrastructure has been observed — it is not a live tracker, and it says nothing about who drives past.

In the 1930s the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded neighbourhoods A through D for mortgage risk, and the grade turned explicitly on the race, ethnicity and immigration status of the residents. Areas graded D were outlined in red — "redlined" — and starved of lending for decades. These lines are the historical substrate beneath much of the present-day geography of wealth, housing and policing. This layer shows a policy applied to an area, drawn from digitised historical maps.

These are buildings and contracts: a facility that has agreed to hold people for ICE, who operates it, and under what kind of agreement. County jails frequently rent bed space to ICE under an intergovernmental agreement, which turns a local facility into part of the federal detention system. This layer describes facilities and contracts only. It contains no information about anyone detained, and never will.

Data centres are the physical substrate the rest of this map runs on: the storage and compute behind plate-reader networks, records systems and the analytics sold to agencies. They also carry immediate local consequences — electricity and water demand, land use, noise, tax abatements, and grid costs borne by other ratepayers. Where a community has organised in response, this layer surfaces the campaign so you can find it rather than start from nothing.