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ImmigrationProf Blog
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The COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project

By immigrationprof

UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data ProjectThe COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project at UCLA Law launched its new public website that shares crucial data on COVID-19 in prisons, jails, and, importantly for the immigration law community, immigration prisons. The Project’s data also includes an impressive collection of information on legal filings and court orders and grassroots and community organizing efforts. With respect to immigration detention data, the Project explains its data gathering on the new website as follows:

“We scrape the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website daily to collect data relating to COVID-19 infections and deaths of detainees and staff within all 120 ICE facilities, as well as other facilities detaining people under ICE jurisdiction, across the United States. ICE only provides a live dataset, meaning that when new data is published, it replaces the previously published data without creating an archive. Therefore, we maintain a historical dataset and merge in newly scraped data as we collect it so that we can understand how the pandemic has unfolded in ICE facilities over time. ICE first started disclosing COVID-19 cases in detention facilities on March 26, 2020, and the agency stopped providing updates regarding COVID-19-related cases and deaths among staff on June 18, 2020.”

IE