‘Political Incentives’ Are Driving ICE To Publish Misleading Data On Trump Admin’s Immigration Crackdown

As the Trump administration seeks to ramp up its highly publicized immigration crackdown, a crucial part of its strategy has been to provide updates on arrests, detentions, and deportations made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on social media. The idea, according to Trump’s border czar Thomas Homan, is to “be transparent with the American people.”

“There needs to be a weekly White House press briefing on exactly who we’re arresting and who we’re saving, who we are putting in jail, and who we are deporting, so the American people know we’re true to our word,” explained Homan in January.

However, immigration researcher and Syracuse professor Austin Kocher told The Latin Times that ICE has “not provided the public with a particularly accurate and fair representation of the work that they’re doing,” and, in fact, the agency’s data is being “ultimately driven by the political incentive structure that the Trump administration believes it has.”

A Closer Look at ICE Immigration Enforcement Data

Days after Trump was sworn in, ICE’s official X account began posting daily totals of arrests and detainers, which are requests that ICE sends to state and local law enforcement agencies to get information on when the person is going to be released so that ICE can take them before.

“Taken together, these two data points do legitimately serve as indicators of enforcement activity,” Kocher said on his immigration blog. “If ICE is doing more enforcement, it’s logical that arrests and detainers will increase.”

However, Kocher, who monitors ICE data in an effort to provide “clear, unbiased information on immigration,” started noticing a shift on how the agency communicated data on its social media channels, a shift that eventually led to ICE scraping posts with data altogether on February 2nd

Instead, ICE now posts several images a day of alleged “serious criminals,” complete with nationality, crimes, and sometimes their full names, an exercise labeled by Kocher as “memeifying immigration enforcement”:

“They gave up and have now just gone 100% into showing what I would argue are statistically selective, non-representative examples of individuals that they may have arrested, that may have those criminal convictions and charges, but they just don’t represent everyone,” explained Kocher in an exclusive interview with The Latin Times.

The communication strategy marks a shift that Kocher says is indicative of an underlying reality bound to shape the immigration discourse going forward: the only way for the Trump administration to increase all of its immigration enforcement numbers (arrests, detentions, deportations, etc.) is to target people who have no criminal convictions.

“The administration has tried very hard to represent the immigration enforcement work that they’re doing as if it were targeting very dangerous people,” said Kocher. “From a data perspective, it is certainly true that a percentage of immigrants, like all people, have criminal convictions or criminal charges that most people would find abhorrent: child abuse and serious crimes.”

“But we can reasonably infer that for them to ramp up enforcement the way that they’re doing is not necessarily going to focus percentage-wise very heavily on those people,” Kocher continued. “It’s mostly going to be people without criminal convictions and charges. So, I guess what I would say is that approach to representing the data is not presenting a full picture.”

Kocher is quick to point out that if an immigrant is in the country without legal status, the government can deport that person regardless of whether they have a criminal history. Nevertheless, as legal analysts have pointed out, there is no law making it a crime to live in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant, as the law itself treats it as a civil, not a criminal violation.

The push to treat immigration violations as criminal offenses rather than civil infractions, however, has all sorts of implications. For starters, there’s the issue of public perception. An AP-NORC poll from January 22 found that, even though 82% of U.S. adults supported deportations for undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of violent crimes, the number shrank to just 37% when asked about deportations for undocumented immigrants without convictions.

For Kocher, this distinction reflects that even though deportations as a whole have grown more acceptable for the general public, there are still nuances with which the Trump administration will still have to deal with going forward:

“If instead of posting all of these profiles of people with serious criminal convictions and charges, ICE properly represented their work appropriately on social media, they would have a post for a guy with serious criminal convictions who’s doing time for his crime and now he’s being deported but then follow that up with a post of a mom with two kids who dropped her kids off at school and then got arrested, a dad who works in construction, a husband and wife who work in a chicken processing plan. If they truly represented it in the proportions to be statistically accurate and consistent, the public might be like: oh, that’s kind of messed up.”

Besides omitting data altogether, ICE has also resorted to misrepresenting data, as a way of “manufacturing urgency and it playing into the administration’s political strategy,” as Kocher explains:

“The images that they use make it seem as if they arrested all these people yesterday and now they’re on deportation flights. In reality, those are two different groups: there’s people that they arrest tomorrow who are going to have a long process and then there’s people on deportation flights who were actually arrested by the Biden administration, not the Trump administration and who are now being flown out. But they misrepresent that as if they were the same thing”

The politization of immigration data is not new. As Kocher points out, “it’s not even a Republican or Democrat thing”. Barack Obama, who was labeled by some as “the deporter in chief” introduced data changes during his presidency that “some people feel didn’t really reflect some massive increase in nationwide immigration enforcement.”

Nevertheless, from Kocher’s own experience, immigration data quality has never been in more peril than with Trump. During the Republican’s first term, Kocher worked at TRAC (transactional record access clearing house), the largest immigration data institute in the country. Back then, TRAC would routinely find data errors which they would communicate to government agencies.

“They did not care,” explains Kocher. “They ignored us and they eventually sent us a really angry letter. So from that experience, I learned just how little they seem to care about data quality.”

So with that history behind him and with his exhaustive research fresh on his mind, Kocher doesn’t hesitate in expressing his concern for what he labels “a real assault on good data”.

“I think that lack of data quality is going to be true again during Trump’s second term,” he says. “And now that the administration is hollowing out government, that means that those parts of the Department of Homeland Security and the parts of the immigration court agency that are committed to the boring but valuable and crucial work of providing clarity and data to the public and to Congress, are the parts that are going to get cut.”

“Data is a fundamental pillar of an informed democracy,” concludes Kocher. “And I’m really concerned.”