Tracking ICE with Media Cloud data

I’m starting my day at MIT at a conference on the quantitative analysis of news, hosted by the folks behind Media Cloud. I shared the stage in the first session with an inspiring set of students, Jack Vu and Abby Manuel, who’ve developed icemap.dev, a map of ICE activity across the US using news data.

Jack and Abby were high school students in Houston, TX and both worked with an academic enrichment program that supported immigrant kids from Guatemala. They noticed that the kids were no longer coming around and discovered that ICE raids in Houston left their students feeling unsafe to leave the house. So they decided to start mapping ICE activity across the country at icemap.dev

They considered a crowdsourced platform, but understood that a) they’d need to build a huge userbase for the tool to have crowdsourcing work and b) they couldn’t know whether all reports were accurate. So instead, they decided to work with news reports, assuming that news reporting would act as a form of quality control. Fortunately, they stumbled on Media Cloud, which is already scraping data from tens of thousands of news outlets on a daily basis, and making that data available via an API.

Jack and Abby search for ICE on Media Cloud and collect new articles every day. They then use DeepSeek to verify whether articles are about ICE raids, to categorize what’s going on in the various stories and store location information and type of incidents in a CSV.

Using Open Street Map and the Leaflet mapping library, they’ve created a map that shows reports of ICE arrests and raids, as well as reports about poor conditions in ICE detention centers. In addition to Media Cloud reports, the site uses data from US government sources and from a nonprofit clearing house that tracks reports from detention centers. Abby explains that using data from the news is critical to ensure that the project represents the voices of people affected, not just government officials.

My talk at Media Cloud traced the origins of the project back to some questions I was asking about undercovered news stories in the global South. It makes me insanely happy that, twenty years later, badass students who weren’t born when we started this work are using it to do something as socially important as visualizing government violence against undocumented migrants.

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