About
A receipt outlives an argument
Detention Receipts is a public-interest ledger of federal immigration detention spending. It exists because the money is documented in public records that almost nobody reads, and because documentation survives political weather that rhetoric does not.
The premise
Detention is built and run through procurement. Congress appropriates, an agency plans, a contracting officer obligates money to a named company, and that company operates a building where people are held. Each of those steps leaves a record with a number on it.
Those records are public and nearly unreadable in their native form. This project reads them one at a time, states plainly what each one shows, and states just as plainly what it does not show. That second half is what makes the first half worth trusting.
Who this is for
- Journalists
- Award identifiers, period dates, and source URLs you can verify before filing.
- Researchers
- Structured records with explicit coverage limits and a downloadable JSON per receipt.
- Local organizers
- Which company operates a facility near you, under which contract, and when it comes up for renewal.
- Oversight staff
- Documented intervention windows: renewals, permits, litigation, IG referrals.
Built to outlast an administration
Nonpartisan here is a working method, not a posture.
The record structure is party-agnostic: appropriations, awards, operators, facilities, periods, and sources. Nothing in the schema depends on who holds office, so a record filed today still parses in ten years, and spending under any future administration enters the same ledger under the same rules.
We do not soften an accurate figure because it is inconvenient, and we do not sharpen one because it is useful. When a source is superseded, the old source stays listed and is marked superseded, so the change itself is auditable.
What this is not
- ×A campaign site. There is no ask, no petition, and no candidate.
- ×A tally of outrage. Every claim is bounded by what its source states.
- ×A leak platform. We publish from public records only.
- ×A directory of detained people. No names are published from anywhere but cited reports.
The alert list
Alerts go out only after a person checks a change against its primary source. We store the email address and the operational fields needed to run the list: signup timestamp, signup source, and subscription status. No tracking pixels.
The list is never sold or shared. Unsubscribe requests are honored by reply or through the corrections form.
Support this work
Help cover public-records research, data, infrastructure, and the unglamorous work required to keep this project independent and accessible.
Support pays for the project’s operation. It buys no influence over what the records say, what gets published, or what a correction concludes.
Support this work