Ari Lamstein

Immigration Enforcement Analytics

This project lets users analyze data on ICE detentions and Border Patrol encounters across the the last three administrations. I documented the data sources, methodology, and results in a three‑part blog series.

In 2025, President Trump increased immigration enforcement in the United States. That made me wonder: what was the baseline for immigration enforcement, and how much was it actually increasing? To answer these questions I created an app that lets users explore publicly available immigration enforcement datasets.

The app has two datasets:

  • ICE Detentions: Sourced from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this dataset provides periodic snapshots of detainee populations held in ICE facilities. The data is scraped from TRAC’s website.
  • Border Patrol Encounters: Combines year-to-date data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with historic data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS). CBP releases new data monthly via downloadable spreadsheets.

To learn more about the data sources, methodology, and design choices, check out these blog posts:

Ari Lamstein

Ari Lamstein

I’m a software engineer who focuses on data projects.

I most recently worked as a Staff Data Science Engineer at a marketing analytics consultancy. While there I developed internal tools for our data scientists, ran workshops on data science and mentored data scientists on software engineering.

I have also created several open source projects.