Any suggestions to change that perception? My goal is to educate how significant the impact is right now with these detainments & deportations, especially on people with zero criminal history.
I'm an experienced activist and if this was my issue area I would be heartened to see this kind of work.
As a non-expert who cares about this issue, the "criminal/other" split is very clear and was the first thing I looked for.
This is very counter to the administration narrative that our country is teeming with foreign gang members, and it is presented in a chill, non-shrill, high credibility way. That's very helpful!
Some more explanation or breakdown on what types of "other" violations dominate (e.g. are these all just overstays?) might be nice, but the point is still well made. I would also like to see what percentage were felony charges/convictions if there's a significant percentage of misdemeanors.
I expect with the recent ICE funding boost and the hiring spree they're about to go on, the "criminal"/"other" ratio going to plummet as ICE climbs the s-curve. It will be very useful to have a live measure of that as it happens.
One meta point: I'm always shocked at how rare it is, for issues that are current and important in the public discourse, that someone makes a technically and visually competent, single-purpose website contributing to the debate. I have seen them to be extremely valuable on campaigns I've worked on, such as the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA site-blocking bills in 2011/2012, but it's so rare anyone makes one. Thank you for creating an exception to a generally disappointing rule!
Really appreciate these kind words, will take them to heart. I actually recently completed my PhD, and my research was in getting this kind of data for public health & building these kinds of dashboards for vaccine hesitancy from social media. I’ve always felt it’s important to present this stuff super clearly, so I’m happy to have a chance to do so on a seriously important topic like this.
Maybe it's just me, but the words, "Other Immigration Violator" rubbed me the wrong way. I see it's a term from the source data and ICE describes the category as, "Other immigration violators are individuals without any known criminal convictions or pending charges in ICE's system of record at the time of the enforcement action."
ICE alleges these people have violated the civil code so calling them "violators" assumes guilt and comes across as inflammatory. Something like like "No Criminal Status" would be accurate and more neutral.
Personally, I'd call them "Productive Members of Society The Rest of Us Depend On."
Great feedback, will work on improving the language for these categories. I agree that ICE has chosen pretty inflammatory names for these otherwise presumptively innocent detainees
You don't find it ironic at all to call the names ICE has chosen 'inflammatory', while you're here brainstorming with multiple people trying to come up with the perfect terminology, phrases, graphs to include vs not include, even the perfect colors to use in order to best impart your political ideology onto the reader?
I don’t. The data is published with a strong political bias which is morally antithetical to our legal system. The point of publishing in this way is to shed light on the human cost rather than the dehumanized political speech currently embedded within it.
Like it or not, this data is highly political. You can’t correctly interpret it in a vacuum.
You already calculate the economic impact of the loss of workers, you could reframe the detention rates based on that. Any way to obviously state, “more is worse,” is a good start.
One other suggestion would be to include, somewhere, an image or oral account of detention conditions.
You could collect oral accounts and invite people to submit them.
From the grapevine (and this makes sense because they're pushing into new numerical territory, and also don't care at all) the conditions are very crowded / harsh. You could also include accounts from family members about the kafkaesque absence of information, e.g. It's good to make the point that almost every number in this chart is a human, and a family and circle of friends, who harmed no one and is being severely harmed.
Maybe the economic impact to the top as a single line? Many people are single issue economics voters so make it clear how much this is hurting the economy. The human rights abuses are unfortunately irrelevant to many.
Also loans forgiven would be nice to see since ICE signups now get a $10K reduction. Not a large number but more to make a point.
I actually think this highlights an important point: the majority of "criminals" in the statistics are likely not to be criminals in any serious sense, and would pose no serious harm to any community whatsoever. After all, the US is a notorious over-incarcerator, and crimes are selectively enforced to keep the underclass in place (you may recall after all that the richest man in the country is an illegal immigrant).
This also underplays the current cruelty of the US system, far out of proportion with any proper policing of immigration (which obviously reasonable people can argue about). So, I don't think you're wrong exactly, and you can play the victim if you want ("I know I will be downvoted", sad violin).
Agree heavily with this. I will be adding more stats on this soon, but you can see on the map chart at the bottom that these detainees are overwhelmingly categorized (by ICE) as low or no threat level, even those convicted of minor offenses & misdemeanors. Very few are “Threat Level 1”, which are the “violent” offenders we hear so much about.
You're downvoted because you're wrong. Illegal entry can be a crime, but that's far from the only way to there the country without legal status, and last I knew visa overstays were the most common immigration violation.
As a non-expert who cares about this issue, the "criminal/other" split is very clear and was the first thing I looked for.
This is very counter to the administration narrative that our country is teeming with foreign gang members, and it is presented in a chill, non-shrill, high credibility way. That's very helpful!
Some more explanation or breakdown on what types of "other" violations dominate (e.g. are these all just overstays?) might be nice, but the point is still well made. I would also like to see what percentage were felony charges/convictions if there's a significant percentage of misdemeanors.
I expect with the recent ICE funding boost and the hiring spree they're about to go on, the "criminal"/"other" ratio going to plummet as ICE climbs the s-curve. It will be very useful to have a live measure of that as it happens.
One meta point: I'm always shocked at how rare it is, for issues that are current and important in the public discourse, that someone makes a technically and visually competent, single-purpose website contributing to the debate. I have seen them to be extremely valuable on campaigns I've worked on, such as the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA site-blocking bills in 2011/2012, but it's so rare anyone makes one. Thank you for creating an exception to a generally disappointing rule!