Public ledger
We trace federal detention money from the appropriation to the contractor, the facility, and the documented harm — then name the institution that can still change it.
25 awards · $5.7B awarded · $2.4B recorded outlays · 9 recorded windows
Money, places, people. Three records that are rarely read together.
Money
25 reviewed award case files
Awards, recipients, ownership, political-finance and lobbying disclosures — each amount type kept separate, no causal claim drawn.
Places
214 facility rows · 68 dossiers
Every row in ICE's detention workbook, plus accountability dossiers built from inspections, litigation and local records.
People
52 named records
Each person named, with what their sources establish and what they do not. No estimate stands in for a person.
Appropriation to award to recipient to facility to leverage point. Each link states what establishes it.
Evidence thread
How one public dollar becomes a record in this ledger. Coverage is partial: every figure below counts only what is currently indexed here, not the national program.
Bed target: 92,600
Link established by Reporting that describes the planning document as drawing on the enacted appropriation. The plan figure and the appropriation figure are different amount types and are never summed.
Outlayed against those awards: $2.4B
Link established by Each award record in this ledger carries its own federal award identifier on USAspending. The link to the appropriation is programmatic, not a line-item trace of specific dollars.
Link established by The recipient name and unique entity identifier printed on each federal award record.
Link established by Facility names stated in the award description or in the agency and company records cited on each receipt.
With a hard date on the record: 4
Link established by Dates and recommendation statuses printed on the award records and oversight reports cited by each window.
Stage 1 of 6. Appropriation: Congress appropriates detention capacity funding.
Evidence boundary
The stages above establish money, authority, entities, sites, and decision points. They do not establish that any award caused any specific harm.
Documented harm — separate lane
Recorded alongside the funding chain, never traced from it. Counts below are published by named organizations within a stated window.
Counts published by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights within their stated window. Causation for any individual death is not asserted here.
Worked example: Camp East Montana. Stated capacity about 5,000; ICE data cited by GAO shows about 1,600 people held at the end of February 2026 while meal costs were paid for 5,000. Read the full case file.
01
Appropriation, award, obligation, outlay. Each amount type is labeled and never blended.
02
Documented conditions, findings, and deaths, kept apart from the contract record. No inferred causation.
03
Named institutions, real decisions, dated where the date is verified. No countdowns, no scores.
STATUS IS NOT A CONVICTION
Observed / verifiedMere unauthorized presence is generally a civil immigration matter. Federal law separately criminalizes specified conduct, including certain improper entries and reentry after removal.
Detention, removability, or immigration status does not itself establish a criminal charge or conviction.
Supreme Court, 2012 · 8 U.S.C. §§ 1325, 1326 · reviewed August 22, 2026
THE CRIME-WAVE CLAIM RUNS BACKWARD
Attributed findingUS-born felony arrest rate relative to undocumented immigrants
Texas, 2012-2018 · rate ratio
This study measures recorded arrests in one state. It does not observe every offense or establish an individual rule.
Light, He, and Robey · PNAS · 2020
TAXES GO IN. ELIGIBILITY OFTEN STOPS AT THE GATE.
Modeled estimateObserved / verifiedEstimated taxes paid in 2022
United States, calendar year 2022 · US dollars
The tax figures are modeled population estimates. This does not mean undocumented people receive no public services or that fiscal effects are identical at every level of government.
ITEP 2024 model of 2022 taxes · 8 U.S.C. § 1611 · IRS
A count inside a source window, kept beside the people it counts. Each named record states what its sources establish and what they do not.
We know their names.
Source window: January 20, 2025 through June 4, 2026
The count establishes deaths recorded in the source window. It does not by itself establish cause, preventability, negligence, responsibility, or any contractor’s role in an individual death.
52 named records indexed of 52 reported deaths. Every person in the reported count has a named record on this site.
View all named recordsOne of the people in that count
Suspected cause, per Physicians for Human Rights medical review: Hemorrhagic stroke leading to brain death
Read the record for Maksym ChernyakThe decisions no source has recorded as closed, then the newest dated changes to the record. Ordered by the date the record prints.
Latest end date reachable under the award if the government exercises all remaining options. The record does not establish that it will.
What this does not establish
A dated contract action establishes money and scope on the federal award record. It establishes nothing about conditions, staffing or who operates a facility.
Latest end date reachable under the award if the government exercises all remaining options. The record does not establish that it will.
What this does not establish
A dated contract action establishes money and scope on the federal award record. It establishes nothing about conditions, staffing or who operates a facility.
Every row is a dated record already published on this site: contract actions from the federal award data and reviewed inspection, oversight and litigation records from the facility dossiers. Rows are ordered by the date the record prints, not by the date this project read it.
Supporting surfaces behind the five sections above.
Every reviewed award, filterable.
Recipients, parents and operators as distinct roles.
ICE's monthly count of people held, and every dated change.
Contracted bed floors against reported population.
How a claim earns its status.
How current each dataset is.
Sent only after a person checks the change against its primary source.