When federal immigration agents shot a Chicago woman during an enforcement operation last fall, authorities said she had rammed officers with her vehicle and was armed with a semi-automatic weapon.
Their account did not hold up in court.
Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jon Seidel began piecing together what actually happened through a series of stories and a public tracker of federal prosecutions tied to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped the assault charges against Marimar Martinez, a Chicago resident shot five times by a Border Patrol agent. Evidence presented in court contradicted key elements of the government’s original account of the encounter.
Court records, Seidel said, often provide the clearest view of what happens during immigration enforcement operations because the details must withstand scrutiny before a judge.
“It forces everyone involved to put the facts on the record,” Seidel said. “Otherwise we’re left with spin.”
The Chicago case reflects a broader pattern. Across the country, journalists and researchers are increasingly reconstructing immigration enforcement through court records, public-records requests and independent datasets, building a clearer picture of who agents are arresting, where operations are taking place and how cases unfold once they reach federal court.
Last year, ProPublica documented cases of U.S. citizens wrongfully arrested or detained by ICE through court filings and public records. The Guardian tracked everyone who died in ICE detention in 2025. The Minneapolis Star Tribune used crowdsourced data about the frequency and locations where ICE agents remain even after federal authorities announced the end of “Operation Metro Surge” in mid-February. Then, in late March, the Chicago Tribune published an analysis of arrests and deportations from “Operation Midway Blitz” that found of the roughly 3,800 people detained and 2,500 deported, most had no criminal record. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment, the newspaper reported.
Jason Martin, professor and chair of Journalism in the College of Communication at DePaul University, said journalists in the United States increasingly are borrowing techniques that investigative reporters in more restrictive information environments have long used to document government activity. When official information is difficult to obtain, reporters turn to court filings, leaks, community reporting and independently assembled datasets to reconstruct events. Those methods, he said, are common in countries where governments tightly control information but are becoming more familiar in the United States as federal agencies release less detailed data about immigration enforcement.
“There is definitely a Venn diagram of journalism, and it overlaps with a public service of gathering data so people can see it,” Martin said. Often, it’s a very slow erosion of commitment to open government or fair governments. Journalists are the first to notice.”
In reporting on immigration enforcement, that often means comparing official accounts with what communities and court records reveal.
“Up until now official voices have been weighted more heavily than community voices,” said Deborah Douglas, director of the Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern University. “We have to recognize that people are experts in their own lived experience.”
That shift has pushed journalists and researchers to assemble their own records of enforcement activity, creating a public record of the moment much like they did at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and before that to document civilian casualties in Iraq.
What the public knows about immigration enforcement now often depends on that kind of reconstruction by journalists and researchers. One of the clearest examples of that effort is the Deportation Data Project.
The project, co-directed by Assistant Professor David Hausman at UC Berkeley Law School, compiles immigration enforcement records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation and turns them into structured datasets that journalists can analyze.
Hausman said the project grew out of the recognition that many details about immigration enforcement are scattered across different agencies and difficult for the public to access.
By assembling those records into structured datasets, researchers can identify patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. Those patterns, Hausman said, often challenge the narrative presented by federal officials.
“The datasets can tell us whether these moments that we see on the news, like the indiscriminate arrests in Minneapolis, are outliers,” he said. “And they’re not.”
The Chicago Tribune’s recent analysis of arrest and deportations relied on data from the Deportation Data Project, which the group got through a public records request, the newspaper reported.
The Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University has also compiled immigration court and enforcement data into accessible datasets that reveal patterns in arrests, asylum decisions and case outcomes.
“It is bizarre that, even though there is so much interest in these public datasets, the only way to get updates relatively quickly is to sue the government under the Freedom of Information Act,” Hausman said. “We’d be happy to see the government make our work unnecessary by publishing and documenting these datasets itself. In the meantime, we promptly publish the datasets the government releases to us, and we don’t give ourselves special or early access to them.”
Using those records, journalists and researchers build charts, maps and trend lines to track how enforcement is unfolding — and increasingly to dispute government claims, although as the Chicago Tribune found in March, observers, including journalists, have been shut out of virtual court hearings, creating a critical information gap.
An analysis of internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement records obtained through FOIA found sharp increases in several categories of federal immigration enforcement. Arrests carried out directly by ICE officers — known as “at-large” arrests — increased more than elevenfold compared with the month before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, according to researchers with the Deportation Data Project. Arrests of people without criminal convictions increased roughly sevenfold during the same period.
News organizations are using those records to analyze the crackdown. Reporters at NBC News, for example, reviewed the ICE data compiled by the researchers and found that street arrests had more than quadrupled compared with the final months of the previous administration.
Those kinds of analyses are helping journalists reconstruct enforcement patterns that federal agencies themselves do not clearly disclose.
“Government data is the ultimate public media,” said Nik Usher, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who studies journalism and democracy.. “It’s our data and it should be ours to use and collected for us and by us.”
But data sets are not easy to build, and most news organizations are not equipped to maintain them. Creating reliable datasets requires technical expertise, time and sustained resources.
“There are very few instances where news organizations are able to build data sets that are usable over and over again,” Usher said. “That’s really the challenge.”
Even so, journalists do not necessarily need federal records to document how immigration enforcement is unfolding, said Miranda Spivack, a journalist who specializes in government accountability.
“Getting anything out of the feds is borderline impossible,” said Spivack, author of a recent book about government secrecy. “We’re not in a good place with government transparency. It’s a very opaque system. I don’t know that it’s going to get any better.”
Instead, she said, journalists can often find critical information closer to home.
“The pressure points are at the state and local level, where the response to local journalists will be a little more helpful,” Spivack said. “People have sources. You should be able to get some stuff from your local police and sheriff. That is going to open up a lot of information even though it may be incomplete.”
Jackie Spinner is the editor of GJR.
