When immigration data becomes political theater

Immigration researcher Austin Kocher warns that reporting arrest quotas without context can amplify administration messaging

Reporters on the immigration beat are very familiar with Austin Kocher, a Syracuse professor and immigration data maven. Kocher is part of a growing cadre of researchers who sift through government numbers, hoping to deliver a measure of clarity to the confusing terrain of immigration enforcement.

Over the past few years, Kocher has carved a niche as a guide through the hillocks and canyons where bureaucratic data, political players and the media overlap.

In a recent post on his Substack, Kocher offered journalists one of his standing warnings: Immigration data rarely is what you think it is.

Not only does Kocher recommend a certain humility when working in this space, he cautions against fixating on the Trump administration’s daily arrest targets.

We talked with Kocher and present our conversation, edited for length and flow. We focused on administrative arrests, a technical term for an arrest for a civil violation of U.S. immigration laws — emphasis on “civil.” Arrests on criminal charges don’t count.

Jon Greenberg: You talk about Immigration and Customs Enforcement administrative arrest data and comparing it to a statement that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made back in April that had a much higher figure. What I saw you doing there was noting that, if you understand what the data does and doesn’t tell you, you may not have the hard data to say that the administration’s claims don’t add up.

Austin Kocher: When we’re looking at data on arrests, we have to remember that an arrest is not just an arrest. There’s a bunch of different kinds of arrests. The administrative arrest data only includes arrests from enforcement removal operations, which is one unit within ICE.

It doesn’t represent all ICE arrests and it doesn’t represent all DHS arrests. So it doesn’t include Homeland Security Investigations arrests. It doesn’t include border patrol arrests. It doesn’t include arrests at ports of entry by the Office of Field Operations.

Greenberg: Government data is always complicated. What makes immigration data particularly knotty? Why is it such a minefield for reporters?

Kocher: It’s so tricky because to understand what the data says, we also have to have not just the data. But we have to have two other entire domains of knowledge. We have to understand the immigration legal system and what the precise legal process looks like. We talk about deportations, we talk about arrests. We talk about detention. Those are shorthands for actually a whole bunch of different categories of actions and codes and specific decisions that ICE makes.

And then the other thing we have to understand is actually the practices. Even if this is what the law says, is this how it actually works in practice? And you have to put all of that together.

And here’s where it loops back for me, Jon, to what do reporters do next with this data.

Let’s say you’re interviewing a government representative, or you’re asking for data, or you’re asking for clarification from spokespeople. You can now ask, “Can you tell us how many other arrests aren’t included?” And that allows us to have a conversation that’s just a little bit smarter, and gets us a little bit closer to trying to understand how to make sense of the administration’s claims.

Greenberg: On your Substack, you blend data with political analysis.

Kocher: Yes.

Greenberg: You speak to Trump’s motives in setting a goal of 3,000 arrests a day. You don’t see evidence that that’s doable, but you have this key line: “The unattainability of the quotas is the point.”

Kocher: That’s right.

Greenberg: And you know that moves you away from a strictly numerical and administrative explanation of the data. So why do you think it’s important to do that?

Kocher: Great question. So a lot of what I do in my public-facing scholarship is very data-driven. And I like that. But my research is also much bigger than just trying to figure out what the numbers are. I’m interested in understanding how data is produced. How people in positions of power and authority use data, or not use data, to justify their more controversial policies and more controversial decisions.

We know that the Trump administration set quotas for 1,500 to 2,000 arrests per day. They never got close to that. They only barely crossed that for a few days in May and June. The numbers really are going up, but they’ve already increased the quota again to 3,000 a day.

My interpretation of that — and others are welcome to draw different conclusions —is we know through political history that there is a strategy around what we might call the manufacturing of endless crisis.

As long as the administration keeps moving the quota bar, as long as ICE can never meet the quota bar, it gives the impression that solving immigration is always out of reach. And things like this help shape the public narrative that well, we need to throw more money at the problem because there’s no way we’re ever going to get to the quota.

Greenberg: And journalists might want to report that the quota is here, and here are the number of arrests, and they don’t add up, which might sound hard-nosed. But you would say that in taking that approach you are, in fact, amplifying the administration’s fundamental message.

Kocher: That’s exactly the conundrum that you face as a reporter. And you are absolutely right. That picture does actually reinforce that narrative. And I think that smart communication strategists within the administration also kind of know that.

Greenberg: I see in your piece you’re actually talking about a community of immigration data champions, as you might call yourselves.

Kocher: Yes.

Greenberg: How do you folks support each other’s efforts now? And is it strictly ad hoc? Or is this becoming a little more intentional? Maybe even a little more structured.

Kocher: It’s it’s interesting that you asked that, because, you know, in the course of my own career over the past 10 years, I’ve gone from feeling like, I think I’m the only person doing administrative data kinds of research, to finding like minds and seeing a real community emerge. I find it incredibly supportive, mutually interdependent, and increasingly driven by principles of greater and greater transparency.

There’s been TRAC for a long time. There’s folks like David Hausman at Berkeley, who started the Deportation Data Project. They said, we’ll do the FOIA work. We’ll do the litigation. We’ll get the data. We’ll make sure it’s not just awful.

That’s a full-time job, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m very happy to pick up where David has left off and do this work of explaining it, walking through it, trying to create some documentation and some conversation around it. And then there’s other folks who are the policy advocates.

I find it to be a really, actually quite a beautiful network and a lovely division of labor. So I’m really really happy to see where the field has gone.