Ours is a time of provably wrong claims, vociferously stated.
Gas prices are headed to $2 a gallon, President Donald Trump claimed. (Not true — gas prices just dipped below an average of $3 a gallon this week.) The drugs carried by a single smuggler’s boat off the coast of Venezuela are potent enough to kill 25,000 Americans. (Another Trump claim that’s not remotely accurate; the annual estimated death toll from all overdoses last year totaled 80,391.) U.S. citizens caught up in immigration raids face only brief inconvenience and are “promptly” let go as soon as it is determined that a person is “lawfully” in the country.
That last assertion, by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in an opinion permitting racial profiling by immigration agents in Los Angeles-area sweeps, caught our eye.
It was an easily tested question: Either U.S. citizens have been detained and arrested or they haven’t. As it happens, we had a reporter who was tracking exactly that. Nicole Foy had been combing social media posts, press reports and court records and had already found multiple instances of citizens who were arrested or detained. It was enough for a story to refute Kavanaugh’s misstatement.
We decided to try to do something more than a “fact check,” a now familiar form of journalism that is worthwhile but generally gets lost in the cacophony of the next day’s claims and counter-claims. And so we set out, through our own independent reporting, to compile a nationwide count of U.S. citizens who were detained by immigration agents. Our hope was that a precise number might break through the noise. We understood from the beginning that this list would be a significant undercount. People who have been improperly arrested have every reason not to further antagonize immigration officers.
Foy’s reporting identified more than 170 citizens who had been detained at raids and protests. More than 20 of these people reported being detained by immigration agents for at least a day during which they were not allowed to call their loved ones or a lawyer. We found about 130 people who were arrested for allegedly assaulting or impeding the work of agents, many of whom were ultimately not charged with any crime or whose cases were quickly dismissed.
In response to questions from ProPublica about the story, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
This story turned out to be one of our most-read investigations of the year. Congressional Democrats launched their own inquiry, and the number of U.S. citizens detained — more than 170 — turned into a focal point of questions about the immigration raids. The number became an important, irrefutable fact in the conversation about the immigration crackdown.
A few weeks after our story appeared, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in Gary, Indiana, that “no American citizens have been arrested or detained,” adding: “We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true and false reporting.”
That assertion was met with a fresh round of fact-checking from news outlets, many of which cited our count of arrests.
Our list of Americans detained was assembled through shoe-leather reporting. That included sifting through English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports, as well as interviewing dozens of people to hear their firsthand accounts. We compiled and reviewed all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers to come up with our tally.
Another recent ProPublica story, on the record number of children detained in federal facilities after encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, drew on internal government data to get a precise picture of a major new trend.
The data showed that 600 children have been placed in shelters by immigration agents so far this year, the highest annual total since recordkeeping began more than a decade ago. That number was only the start. From our previous reporting on this subject, we knew that some portion of immigrant children sent to federal shelters were removed from their homes because of concerns about possible abuse or neglect. And so we gathered records for some 400 of the kids and found around 160 were in detention as a result of alleged child welfare concerns, similar to levels seen in past years. However, our reporting showed something unprecedented: that a solid majority of the children were being held because of the ongoing crackdown, many picked up after routine traffic stops or at immigration hearings, or detained after ICE agents came to a home or business to arrest someone else.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, told ProPublica that ICE “does not separate families” and instead offers parents the choice to have their children deported with them or to leave the children in the care of another safe adult, consistent with past practices. The White House said the administration was “ensuring that unaccompanied minors do not fall victim to … dangerous conditions.”
As the leader of a news organization that seeks to spur change through journalism, I am frequently asked how we can restore the public’s trust in the media, which has steadily declined over the years. There are no easy answers to this question, of course. One is to acknowledge errors whenever we make them and correct the record as soon as possible. Another is to be precise with our journalism, providing specific statistics that can be verified by readers.
As we’ve been telling our supporters this week in our winter fundraising appeals, this sort of reporting takes enormous amounts of time and effort. Earlier this year, we managed to trace the criminal histories of 238 Venezuelans sent to an infamous prison in El Salvador. We obtained unpublished U.S. government data — which we verified by scouring police and court records in the U.S. and abroad (with help of Venezuelan reporting partners) — and found the Trump administration knew that at least 197 had not been convicted of crimes in the United States. Only six had convictions for violent offenses in American courts. This research allowed us to create an interactive database of all the men that showed, among other things, at least 166 were labeled gang members in part because of their tattoos, an indicator the government itself acknowledges is not reliable.
Our reporters also chased down the facts when the federal government raided a Chicago apartment building in late September, claiming it had been taken over by members of the Tren de Aragua gang. After federal officials declined to release the names of the 37 Venezuelan immigrants detained, our reporters identified 21 of them and interviewed a dozen. Their reporting, which included reviewing public record databases, court documents, video recordings and social media posts, ultimately found little evidence to back up the government’s claims.
You won’t get this sort of clear-eyed precision from the federal government, which has restricted the collection and publication of data on the effects of its major initiatives; or from congressional oversight committees, which hold few hearings; or from the immigration agencies’ internal watchdogs, which have been largely dismantled. At this moment in history, the counting and measuring have fallen to the media, and we’re grateful every day for your support in helping us do this essential job in our democracy.
