Methodology

Data sources

Agency data is compiled from the following sources:

• ICE 287(g) participants list — the current official list of participating agencies published by ICE. Scraped and archived regularly.
• appelson/Tracking_287g — a community archiving effort that maintains historical ICE spreadsheets and individual MOA PDFs going back to 2016.
• FBI Law Enforcement Employees (LEE) — jurisdiction population, sworn officer and civilian counts, and staffing ratios (officers per 1,000 residents). Each row carries its own data year; we keep the most recent.
• Wikidata — agency website URLs sourced via SPARQL queries against the Wikidata knowledge graph.
• MuckRock — linked FOIA requests for individual agencies, sourced from MuckRock's public request database.
• U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer — county, place, and county-subdivision centroid coordinates used to position agencies on the map.
• Geocod.io — a geocoding service used to locate the handful of agencies (university and airport police, regional authorities) the Census files don't recognize by name.

Matching agencies

Agency names vary across sources. We normalize names and use fuzzy string matching to link records across datasets, then hand-review ambiguous matches. Each agency in our index includes a confidence score for its cross-source matches.

Placing agencies on the map

The source data gives each agency's state and usually its county, but not a precise address. We place each agency at a representative point: municipal police are mapped to the center of their town or city, and county sheriffs and other county-level agencies to the center of their county, using U.S. Census Bureau gazetteer coordinates. A handful of agencies the Census files don't recognize — university and airport police, a few regional authorities — are located with the Geocod.io geocoding service. These are approximate points showing where an agency is based, not the area it operates in; jurisdiction boundaries are in the works.

Statewide agencies — state police, departments of corrections, and similar bodies — are not shown on the map, because a single dot would misrepresent a jurisdiction that covers the whole state. They remain in the data and in all counts.

A note about jurisdiction and population

Population jurisdiction has always been a fraught but useful metric in understanding the activities of law enforcement agencies. We include it here to provide a very rough sense of the scale of law enforcement involved in 287(g) agreements, while taking care not to overcount overlapping jurisdictions (e.g. the population of a city is contained by the population of the county).

Population data is from the FBI's Law Enforcement Employment dataset and reflects each agency's jurisdictional residential population — the residents of the area the agency serves, not necessarily the people encountering immigration enforcement. And jurisdiction size and enforcement scope diverge sharply by agency type and program model: a state highway patrol's jurisdiction is the whole state but its work looks nothing like a small-town police department's, and a county sheriff running a Jail Enforcement Model only touches people who get booked into the jail.

Limitations

• Some agencies have had agreements lapse and rejoin. Historical participation dates may be incomplete.
• MOA PDFs are not available for all agencies. We link to the appelson archive where available.

Updates

The pipeline is re-run regularly to capture new ICE announcements. The data snapshot date is shown on each page.

License & citation

Data compiled by this project is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. If you use this data, please attribute: Recovered Factory / 287(g) Watch (287g.recoveredfactory.net).

Contact

Questions, tips, corrections, or collaboration:

• Tory Lysik — lysiktory@gmail.com · tlysik.com
• David Eads — davideads@gmail.com · davideads.com
• Recovered Factory — recoveredfactory.net