Detained in Danger: Human Rights First Team Examines COVID-19 Inside ICE Facilities
Introduction
Our Human Rights First (HRF) Team collaborated with HRF to develop a database tracking COVID-19 cases at ICE detention centers. Check out the final deliverable here.
The webpage includes a facility COVID-19 case count ranking chart, an interactive map showing facilities by state, baseball-card-style statistics tabs for each facility, and articles offering different perspectives on outbreaks at ICE centers. The team also wrote a press release and published social media posts for the HRF website. The content of their posts and press release can be found here.
The Case Team Lead, Anna Duffy ‘21, worked with Jakob Troidi (Harvard SEAS Research Fellow), Paige Lee ‘22, Noah List ‘24, Kathryn Kuhar ‘20, and Alex Domash (Harvard Kennedy School MPP ‘21) on this project.
Methodology and Findings
The Human Rights First team developed an informative map and conducted trend analysis and contextualization of the ICE facility coronavirus data. Thus, the team was responsible for communicating with project commissioners, reporting on key findings from data and conditions inside Otay Mesa Detention Center, and producing social media posts to publicize the project. Kathryn researched the Adelanto ICE Processing Center; Alex reported on transfers of detainees; and Jakob, Noah, and Paige focused on website visualizations.
The team derived the map from a template on bl.ocks.org, customizing it using the D3 library and Javascript. This functionality allowed for interactivity—by clicking on a facility on the scroll-down facility ranking chart, the user can bring up a baseball-card like figure with updated statistics and graphs tracking case counts over time. The frontend of the website was created using CSS and HTML. The formatting was loosely based on a W3 template.
Zooming in on California:
By hovering your mouse over the Otay Mesa Detention Center, you can see the facility’s name.
By clicking a specific facility on the scroll-down menu, you can see a baseball-card-style tab displaying information about the specific center’s case count.
In order to maintain the accuracy of rapidly changing numbers, the team created an automatic web scraper that updates the visualizations daily. The data is scraped from ice.gov, as well as other sources with information on facility locations, total detainees, and center operators. An option at the bottom of the website allows users to download the cleaned and compiled data for their own projects.
While the CDC recommended positivity rate is 10%, the ICE test positivity rate is around 50% nationally and surpasses 70% percent at some detention centers.
Through the project, the team discovered that, as of June, ICE had tested about 10% of the detained population. ICE does not publish data on facility-level testing rates, but most facilities did not report positive cases; this may be due to the lack of widely accessible testing. The test positivity rate refers to the proportion of total COVID tests that yielded positive results. While the CDC recommended positivity rate is 10%, the ICE test positivity rate is around 50% nationally and surpasses 70% percent at some detention centers. Many facilities have been holding eight detainees in 250 square foot cells. When detainees test positive, ICE often places them into a shared living space known as a “pod” in order to keep them away from others. Access to personal protective equipment is very limited.
The Human Rights First team concluded that detainees at facilities suffered from insufficient access to testing that violated CDC recommendations. To make matters worse, ICE-reported data likely contains significant limitations. Therefore, the situation is likely worse than the visualizations on the team’s website suggest.
Human Rights First reflected on their experience with the Harvard College Data Analytics Team: “Absolutely sparkling performance by the case team. HCDAG was a pleasure to work with, and the site they created for us is going to directly impact lives.”
This article reports the work of Harvard College Data Analytics Group’s COVID-19 Crisis Response Team. Edited by Kelsey Wu.