Tag: TRAC

JHISN Newsletter 03/08/2025

Posted on March 8, 2025 by - News, Newsletter

Dear Friends,

As a smothering blanket of white nationalism and authoritarianism descends over the US, sanctuary cities are a crucial line of defense against the regime’s plans for mass deportation. In our last newsletter, we saw that many US cities are reaffirming their sanctuary city status in defiance of ICE threats. Today’s newsletter adopts the definition of “sanctuary city” as “a collection of policies and political will” and discusses Mayor Adams’ corrupt betrayal of NYC’s promise of sanctuary.

Our second article introduces you to TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse). We explain how this unique and valuable tool has provided public access to data from various federal government agencies and explore its current transformation.

 

1. Adams Attack on Sanctuary Causes Fear and Confusion

“I think Mayor Adams does not know his own city or does not care to know his own city. The people who pay taxes in his city. The people who go out and shop every morning. The people who are up at 4 a.m. driving deliveries. Those are the people who run this city and are being served up on a silver platter for President Trump.” –Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, Street Vendor Project

The term “sanctuary” evokes mental images of families sheltering from ICE in church basements or private homes. For instance, during the first Trump administration, Aura Hernandez and her children, fleeing violence in Guatemala, lived inside the Fourth Universalist Society in Manhattan for almost a year, successfully holding off ICE attempts to deport them. Today, churches are quietly discussing their options for similar actions. 

But what is a “sanctuary city”? After all, we can’t put walls around NYC. As a November article in The City explains, “‘sanctuary city’ isn’t really a hard-and-fast legal edict. It’s more of a collection of policies, combined with political will, that guide how local and federal authorities [such as ICE] interact.” 

In practice, this includes guaranteeing legal rights and access to public services for all residents, whatever their immigration status. It often involves outlawing immigrant detention centers. Of critical importance today, it usually means refusing to help ICE deport people in city facilities like schools, jails, courts, and hospitals unless they have a warrant signed by a judge. 

But in NYC, both political will and policies are under attack from right-wing forces and the Adams administration. While undocumented immigrants were hailed as heroic “essential workers” only a few years ago, they are now endangered because of a failure of solidarity, manufactured confusion, and the mayor’s craven and self-serving accommodation with the Trump regime’s plan for mass deportation.

Adams has claimed on many occasions that he upholds New York’s sanctuary city status. But since Trump’s reelection, the mayor has turned sanctuary into a bargaining chip, cynically offering up the city’s 400,000 undocumented immigrants as a potential sacrifice to get himself out from under federal corruption charges. In December, he declared, falsely, that immigrants accused of crimes were not eligible for due process under the Constitution. He floated the idea of using executive orders to get around current sanctuary laws and help ICE arrest more immigrants. 

On February 10, a federal Justice Department memo announced that serious criminal charges against Adams would be suspended—not because they lacked merit, but because they might supposedly interfere with Adams’ ability to fight crime and “illegal immigration.” On February 14, Adams and Trump “border czar” Tom Homan appeared on “Fox and Friends” to celebrate their new collaboration. A visibly perspiring Adams, laughing nervously, told Homan, “I want ICE to deliver.” Homan, for his part, told the Fox audience that “If he [Adams] doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch, I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is this agreement we came to?”

During a partisan Capitol Hill hearing designed to attack sanctuary city mayors earlier this week, anti-immigrant Republicans treated Adams with kid gloves. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer even praised him for his willingness to work with ICE. It was Democrats who challenged Adams, denouncing his collaboration with Homan. 

Even before Trump’s February 16th executive order to open up sensitive areas like churches and schools to deportation raids, the Adams administration was pushing city agencies to loosen sanctuary city protections and to cooperate with ICE. Instead of instructing city employees to follow sanctuary policy, keeping ICE out unless they showed a legal warrant, Adams directed that “if you reasonably feel threatened or fear for your safety, you should give the officer the information they have asked for or let them enter the site.” This is widely viewed as undermining the intent of sanctuary city legislation. Since then, the mayor has promised to “coordinate” with ICE on deportations.

Immigrant advocates are proactively organizing on several fronts against what they see as an ominous weakening of the spirit and letter of sanctuary city provisions. On February 6, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and other Democrats held a news conference outside Kings County Hospital to protest a memo from NYC Health + Hospitals that warned workers not to help patients avoid ICE. Other hospitals have circulated similar memos, causing widespread controversy and anxiety among patients, employees and immigrant communities.

Immigration activists are also trying to stop the reopening of an ICE outpost at Rikers Island, which was closed down in 2015 as a result of sanctuary city legislation. The ICE facility was using fingerprints and other jail data to deport many prisoners awaiting trial. This kind of synergy between prison systems and ICE contributed to a surge of deportations under the Obama administration. Adams now hopes to use an “executive order” of dubious legality to restore the Rikers ICE station. 

On February 9, in the wake of reports that immigrant families are keeping their children home due to worries about ICE in the schools, Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos released a video to reassure parents. “As always, non-local law enforcement is not permitted in any of our school buildings without a judicial warrant or unless there are exigent circumstances,” she said. However, given Adams’ support for ICE, Make The Road Action’s Manuel Ordonez found Aviles-Ramon’s words less than comforting. “It’s impossible that my community is going through this difficult time, that they can’t even go to church, they can’t take their kids to school, they can’t shop at supermarkets because of fear of being arrested and deported.”

To the best of our knowledge, mass ICE raids have not yet occurred in NYC schools, hospitals, courthouses or churches. But activists are concerned that Adams is helping Trump to lay the groundwork: criminalizing immigrants, cheerleading ICE, releasing memos and executive orders that challenge sanctuary laws, and generally stoking fear. “This mayor has been running amok in this city for too long, all for his own self interest,” says Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “He’s enabling Trump’s mass deportation machine by sowing confusion.”

What Can We Do?

2. The Return of Vital Immigration Data

On January 8, 2025, a critical and unique reporting tool, which JHISN has often used for reliable data reports about US immigration, abruptly went silent. The esoterically named Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) was established in 1989 by Susan Long and the late David Burnham. As Director of the Center for Tax Studies at Syracuse University (SU), Susan had leveraged the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to gather Internal Revenue Service data for her work and dissertation. David was an investigative reporter of some renown. She was into numbers, and he was into words. They both advocated for public access to information and so, together, established TRAC with its purpose of “providing the American people with comprehensive information about staffing, spending, and enforcement activities of the federal government.” 

David and Sue created a FOIA model for gathering data from non-cooperative federal organizations that would simply claim they did not have the information to share. Their TRAC process begins with a FOIA demand for available metadata about the topic of their research. After analysing the documents from that demand, they initiate further FOIA requests for the data disclosed by the initial metadata. The final step of their process uses data analysis to produce validated reports for general consumption. This makes it possible for us to discover, for example, that at this same time last year, over 600 people at the Genesse detention facility in New York state had been detained by ICE for one to two years.

50% of TRAC staff time is spent on FOIA requests, and each request is lengthy. A recent settlement for immigration data took 20 years. They currently have three FOIA lawsuits against ICE, initiated in 2010. ICE challenged those requests by simply asserting that the immigration data was exempt from disclosure. The courts ruled in TRAC’s favor. This FOIA work is conducted by pro-bono lawyers, often from the Public Citizen Legislation Group, a public interest law firm litigating cases at all levels of the federal and state judiciaries. The work of Public Citizen primarily involves consumer health & safety and consumer financial protection, overseen by the federal agencies that Elon Musk’s Dept of Government Efficiency recently decimated based on the recommendation of Project 2025.

Over the past 35 years, TRAC has produced a huge trove of data describing US immigration, Judges, and the federal agencies of the ATF, DEA, FBI, and the IRS. They also have a TracPlus report revealing data about civil rights, Social Security, and the environment. Perhaps surprisingly, Federal organizations have relied on TRAC reporting data for internal use. They do this through a subscription model that allows organizations, news media, and lawyers to access the data compilations. The Federal Reserve board once held a subscription because the TRAC reporting was more accessible than any internal systems. Immigration departments also have subscriptions because they have to give criminal enforcement data to prosecutors, and TRAC provides that data. 

Sue points out that, although organizations may use TRAC data to assist in policy advocacy, TRAC itself is NOT a policy group: TRAC is focused on data availability. Since 1999, SU had hosted the TRAC database and reports on its website. Developing a new website with a better user experience was something Sue and David had been discussing over the last decade. However, the transition to the new tracreports.org site was fast-tracked in January. According to The Houston Chronicle, there had been a “sometimes testy internal [university] dispute” over the last two years, resulting in the recent deletion of the entire TRAC archive from the SU website. ⁠The university maintains there has been no external pressure to take down the TRAC site, however, the removal came at an inopportune time, just as the anti-immigrant Trump administration was about to return to power. 

The new website TRAC launched last month allows them to provide more effective access to data. For example, their new Quick Facts on Immigration reveals that over 50% of those held in ICE detention have no criminal record. They are still working to reestablish access to ALL the data that once lived on the SU website, but are currently prioritizing the release of key information. 

In addition to immigration data reporting, the TRAC website includes access to a substantial and always growing Reference Library of Government Studies on Immigration. The team has also been sending data to people who made specific requests for information that is not yet back online. In fact, the TRAC team had no sense of how broadly their data was in use until they started receiving emails from around the world, including from JHISN, asking what happened and if and when the website would be back online. 

Before 2015, the work of TRAC had been recognized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as the FOIA Project. Since that time, David and Susan had discussed how the TRAC system could continue after they are no longer around, a question that has gained urgency following David’s passing last year. They had established TRAC as a non-profit organization so that it, not they, and not SU, owned the data. They have seen thriving non-profits fail after the founding leader retired, and they both knew that the co-directorship that worked so well for them may not be the way for future leadership. Sue is certain that much of TRAC’s future will rely on volunteer support, and she is actively seeking and inviting discussion from others with solid ideas as to what the next stage in TRAC’s life will look like and determining how that future can be led.

What Can We Do?

 

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

JHISN Newsletter 09/28/2024

Posted on September 28, 2024 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

As racist targeting of immigrants of color intensifies across the US, immigrant justice leaders are pushing back. In Ohio, the Haitian Bridge Alliance has filed criminal charges against Trump and JD Vance for their incendiary lies about Haitian immigrants living and working in Springfield. And NDLON (National Day Laborer Organizing Network) has just released an Instagram video debunking false narratives about recent migrant arrivals that promote hatred, and fracture solidarity between immigrant communities.

We join the call for pro-immigrant popular education with an article that helps us more accurately perceive the ‘statistics’ on the number of undocumented immigrants in the US. Then we look at the Republican-fueled nightmare in Springfield, with an eye for how the threat of expanding fascism—targeting immigrants and other historically marginalized people—has arrived.  

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Confronting the Fear of Big Numbers: Counting Undocumented Immigrants
  2. Fascism in Uniform Marches on Springfield

 

1. A simpler approach to undocumented population counts

Recent attention has focused on Ohio and the ridiculous social media lies amplified by Trump during the presidential debate. Republicans became hyper-obsessed about Haitians living in Ohio, who are legally present through the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. In Ohio, almost 13,000 people have TPS approval, or just one-tenth of one percent of the state’s entire population. Yet to Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, this minuscule population represents a “terrible tragedy” for the people in his state.

This Ohio situation exemplifies the difficulty of accurately visualizing any large numbers describing immigrants. It is easy for politicians and the corporate media to utter worrisome-sounding numbers in the millions because such numbers have no practical meaning in the human mind.

Republicans have leveraged that impracticality to argue that the number of people here with, and without, ‘authorization’ is massively large and a threat. Although there are bipartisan differences around immigration issues, the Democrats have also embraced the perceived ‘threat’ of immigrants, as outlined in their recently proposed and failed border bill.

When discussing unauthorized immigrants, things get murkier due to difficult data. Since 1996 the federal government has published official estimates—these have been challenged as a dramatic undercount. There are statistics shared by organizations that conduct research about immigrants—these can conflict based on the organization’s bias. There are public data sets such as Syracuse University’s TRAC Data which allow anyone to delve into the data—these require an understanding of how to analyze numbers. All data sources take effort to find, read, and understand. The numbers spewed by Donald Trump, or Tucker Carlson, are easy, simplistic, and wrong. 

But, sometimes simplification can help us understand reality.

Instead of looking at large numbers, we can ask the following question: how many people are there in the US for each undocumented immigrant? State population data, Pew research on immigrants, and an infographic from a large data analyst company offers a simple answer: in the US there is just one undocumented immigrant for every 65 people. That may initially sound like lots of unauthorized people until we realize that 1 in 10 is just 10% of the population; 1 in 20 is only 5%; 1 in 30 is merely 3.3%. So 1 in 65 is a paltry 1.5% of the entire population. Republicans are telling 98.5% of the country to worry that this tiny group is a massive threat to the nation’s very being. As the regional and state populations differ, it is interesting to see how the answer to this question changes based on each location we look at.

  • We can compare Ohio, where there are 91 people for each unauthorized individual (1.2%), with New York State which has 30 people per unauthorized individual (3.3%).
  • Throughout the four states that border Mexico, we find there is one undocumented person for every 28 people. That is only 3.6% of the California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas populations combined.
  • In the 16 states that have a land or water border with Canada, the number changes to 1 in 89 people. That is slightly more than 1% of all those state populations combined.
  • Of the 14 states that border only with another US state, it averages to 1 in 77 people. Just 1.3%.
  • For the 16 remaining states, with an ocean border, the numbers change to just 1 in 44. That is only 2.4% of those populations.

The simplified number also tells a story about states traditionally voting for a Republican or Democrat presidential candidate and the 7 swing states in the coming 2024 election. In the 25 typically Republican states we see 1 unauthorized person in 81 (1.2%); that becomes 1 in 40 for the 18 typically Democrat states (2.5%); and the 7 swing states come in at 1 undocumented immigrant out of 48 (2.1%).

If people in critical swing states can see these more straightforward numbers, they may come to understand that the lies Trump, Vance, and many others obsessively make about Americans being replaced and endangered by ‘illegal’ immigrants are not substantiated by the data. With that knowledge, they can vote with understanding, not unfounded fear.

2. Then they came for the Haitians…

Our August 17 newsletter argued that Donald Trump’s demand for mass deportation was on the cutting edge of a rising fascist movement that is beginning to move into the mainstream of US politics. Now the ongoing racist political attack on documented Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, makes it clear that this poison is spreading fast. 

Most of the basic ugly facts of the Springfield situation are well reported: The baldfaced lies by Trump and Vance alleging that Haitians are eating other residents’ pets, bomb threats that paralyzed the city, requests by Catholic bishops and government officials, including the Republican governor, for Trump and Vance to stop the damaging falsehoods and threats. We have learned from mainstream media that Trump has doubled down on his plan to deport Haitians in Springfield on Day One if he gets elected (despite the fact they have federally-registered TPS protections), promising that this would kick off a mass deportation campaign that, he warns, will be “bloody.”

One thing that has been less widely reported is the story of the Weber family—a story that happened on the sidelines of the national news. What happened to the Webers is frightening and damaging. But it also exemplifies how anti-immigrant hate, and especially hate towards Black migrants, quickly mutates beyond the issue of immigration, opening the door to an increase in fascist activism that targets all marginalized groups, regardless of immigration status. 

Chelsea Shirk Weber told the Dayton Jewish Observer that she, her husband, and their 4-year-old daughter went to a Jazz and Blues Fest in downtown Springfield on August 10. As they were leaving, they saw a squad of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marching in formation, complete with red uniforms, swastika flags and automatic weapons. Hearing people yelling and other loud noises, the family moved swiftly to their car. But as the Webers tried to drive away in traffic, they and other motorists were surrounded by four Blood Tribe members who pointed rifles at their cars. There were no police visible nearby. “Go back to f-ing Africa,” the fascists yelled. Chelsea’s husband accelerated, running a red light to get away.

Blood Tribe claims credit for creating and spreading the rumor about Haitian migrants eating pets, starting their online campaign months ago. They consider it a victory that the Trump campaign (and 53% of Trump supporters) have adopted their lies. 

Photo Credit: Chelsea Shirk Weber

Weber took a photograph of some of the fascists—the image above. When she posted it on the Facebook pages of Springfield and of Clark County, there was a massive pile-on by right-wing commenters who either supported Blood Tribe or alleged that the photo was fake. Soon Weber’s post was taken down. Five minutes later, the City of Springfield posted a bland statement expressing “concern” about an outside hate group that had been in town. The mayor, Rob Rue, was quoted as saying that “Nothing happened, except they expressed their First Amendment rights. Our Police Division was aware and in control the entire time.”

Weber does not agree:

“”It was just completely disappointing that the government said, ‘Oh, they’re just exercising their First Amendment right and they did no harm.’ Tell that to my 4-year-old, who is completely traumatized. I’m 37 and I was scared s—less. How do you explain it to a 4-year-old?’ The Observer provided Police Chief Elliott with a transcript of Weber’s interview. Despite repeated attempts to reach out to Elliott for a follow-up interview, she declined to comment.” —Dayton Jewish Observer, 8/22/24

The Springfield events demonstrate how Blood Tribe and other other fascists like the Proud Boys and the KKK are using racist attacks on immigrants and calls for mass deportation to raise their public profile, recruit, and normalize their full program of hate against people of color, women, LGBT people, Jews and leftists. And the concentration camps the fascists hope to build for millions of undocumented people are intended for many other perceived enemies as well.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.