This simple site makes it easy to track ICE’s actions
As the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration continues, keeping up with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement can feel like navigating a maze. From stories of agents raiding worksites and taking children in broad daylight to reported plans for new detention centers, the daily onslaught of alarming news makes it difficult to see the full picture of ICE’s actions at any given moment.
Data journalist Michael Sparks is working on a solution. Sparks is a cartographer and coding editor at the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization producing investigative stories about human rights, labor, and environmental concerns at sea. He’s applied skills from that role to create a new investigative database, “The Machinery of Mass Detention: A Record of What Has Been Lost,” designed as a centralized place to get updates on ICE’s movements.
The database, which is housed at icetracking.org, includes continuously updating sections that track statistics like the total number of people currently detained by the U.S., the percentage of people held in ICE facilities with no criminal record, and the number of people who have died in ICE custody in the past month and year. The information is presented in succinct sections with citations from major news outlets that are easily fact-checked.
Icetracking.org is a devastating but necessary resource to keep the public informed on the state of the administration’s immigration crackdown from a macro perspective, rather than simply in constant bursts of new information.
How one data journalist is keeping track of ICE
In his day job at the Outlaw Ocean Project, Sparks uses tens of thousands of government documents, news articles, and social media posts to build databases of environmental and human rights abuses at sea. Before that, he served as a product developer at The New York Times for four years, where he honed his data storytelling skills. Sparks says he felt compelled to use his skillset to hold power to account after Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE officers in January.
“I knew there was another vast amount of cruelty happening all over the country, and wanted people to realize that,” he says.
Sparks took a little less than three weeks from starting the site to debuting it this week. It’s essentially a database composed of aggregated reports and stories from national outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS News, as well as local sources like Tulsa World, Houston Chronicle, and The Minnesota Star Tribune.
The tracker’s code is programmed to send Sparks a list of relevant articles from these trusted sites every 48 hours, which he then manually approves or rejects, writes up a summary, and uses to update the site.
In a memo at the bottom of the site, Sparks emphasizes the human toll behind the database: “What the numbers cannot capture is the texture of individual lives disrupted—the five-year-old taken from his walk home from school, the nurse shot dead while filming a protest, the grandmother detained at a routine government appointment. These cases, documented in the sections that follow, are not abstractions. They are the human particulars of a policy that has reshaped the landscape of American civil liberties.”
“I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act”
Icetracking.org’s true impact rests in the way it displays information. Sparks says he pulled inspiration from The New Yorker’s UX for his design, opting for a simple color palette of white and black with pops of red for the most important information, and organizing the whole page into clear sections.
When people first open icetracking.org, they see a succinct layout of seven key statistics, including the total number of people currently detained by ICE (around 73,000); the percentage of those being held with no criminal convictions (73.6%); and the number of people who died in ICE custody in 2025 (32, with 2026 expected to be even worse). Sparks says he updates these statistics any time one of his trusted sources publishes a new estimate.
Users can then navigate to a header bar, organized by sections, for more information on each of the categories. Each subcategory similarly opens with a layout of the most significant statistics, followed by links to top articles. For one section, titled “Corporate Network: Who Profits From ICE,” Sparks created a color-coded chart to track the kinds of companies that have provided funding or support to ICE, as well as the scale of their contributions. These include the detention facility contractor GEO Group, the AI technologies company Palantir, and the tactical communications service CACI International.
“The corporate network felt super important,” Sparks says. “These are detention ‘networks.’ Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are not doing this themselves. This section deserves a lot more reporting that, in an ideal world, I could do.”
So far, Sparks says, the reaction to the tool has been a mix of gratitude and horror at seeing this information presented in one place. “To be honest, that’s the kind of response I’m looking for,” he says. “I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act.”