Disappeared: 10,000 and Counting

The public controversy tends to focus on the border and migrant caravan or on Washington D.C. and Donald Trump’s desired wall and the partial government shutdown. However, a team of 16 Media Milwaukee student journalists set out on a three-month investigative quest to better understand the immigration question in one major Midwestern community – Milwaukee, Wisconsin – where there is a thriving immigrant population but the topic doesn’t often make national headlines.

Wisconsin is 35th in the country when it comes to the number of ICE detainer holds, with just over 10,000 dating back to 2005. That number comes from a Syracuse University center that has obtained aggregate, comparative, numerical data from ICE for years. However, ICE is ramping up secrecy, making it harder for the national clearinghouse to provide even aggregate numbers. Through dozens of open records requests with local jails and the state prison system, Media Milwaukee obtained more than 500 names of people with ICE detainers filed against them since 2014.

Read the entire project website here.