What independent databases track shootings by ICE and CBP agents and how do their methodologies differ?
Executive summary
Three independent projects and one congressional dashboard currently form the most visible public tracking of shootings and use-of-force by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP): The Trace’s incident tracker, volunteer-led aggregations cited by outlets like The Marshall Project and Get the Facts Data Team that rely on The Trace, the crowd-sourced/verification project “ICE List” that catalogs personnel rather than incidents, and the House Oversight Committee’s Immigration Enforcement Dashboard that records alleged misconduct after the fact; each uses different sources, scope rules and publication goals, producing complementary but non‑identical tallies and known undercounts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. The Trace — a nonprofit gun‑violence tracker built from public reporting and tips
The Trace has explicitly positioned itself to track “gun incidents connected to” federal immigration enforcement and asks readers to submit tips, compiling incidents from news reports, public records and tip submissions; news coverage and nonprofit analyses cite The Trace as the primary source for counts of shootings involving ICE or CBP agents [1] [3]. The Trace’s methodology, as reported, privileges documented incidents in public media and corroborated tips rather than internal agency logs, which gives it public transparency but also means it will miss incidents that go unreported or unrecognized in mainstream outlets [1] [2].
2. Get the Facts Data Team / newsroom analyses — derivative aggregations that add coding and interpretation
Local and regional newsrooms and data teams — exemplified by the Get the Facts Data Team cited by WCVB — have used The Trace’s raw incident list as a starting dataset and applied their own coding (counts of shootings, shootings that resulted in death, non‑lethal force) to produce narrative analyses; those outputs are valuable for summarizing trends but inherit The Trace’s source limitations and add editorial choices about categorization [2]. Because these teams re‑code incidents (for example, distinguishing shootings that resulted in death vs. injury), their totals can differ from The Trace depending on how incidents are classified and what corroboration threshold is required [2].
3. ICE List — a personnel catalog with activist aims, not an incidents database
ICE List is a volunteer‑led project that has published names and profiles drawn from a leak of ICE and Border Patrol personnel; it is hosted outside the U.S. and aims to expose employees identified in the leak rather than systematically log use‑of‑force incidents, so it can be used to cross‑reference who was on duty but does not itself document shootings the way The Trace does [4] [6]. The project’s explicit agenda — reform and moral opposition to ICE/CBP — and use of leaked data shapes both its scope and critics’ concerns about doxxing and safety, which differentiates it ethically and operationally from neutral incident trackers [4].
4. House Oversight Committee’s Immigration Enforcement Dashboard — a post‑hoc official‑facing misconduct registry
The Democratic House Oversight Committee’s Immigration Enforcement Dashboard records reported possible misconduct after it occurs and invites public submissions; it is not a live tracking tool of officer movements and emphasizes documenting misconduct complaints rather than producing a contemporaneous incident feed, which makes it useful for oversight but less useful for immediate incident counts [5]. Because it is a congressional Democratic initiative, the Dashboard carries an implicit political purpose — oversight and accountability — and therefore frames incidents within a misconduct‑investigation lens rather than neutral statistical surveillance [5].
5. How the methodologies differ — sources, verification, scope and implicit agendas
In short, The Trace relies on public reporting and tip submissions and is transparent about crowdsourced leads [1], newsroom teams re‑analyze and recode those incidents to produce different metrics [2], ICE List focuses on personnel from a leak and advances a reformist agenda rather than incident documentation [4] [6], and the Oversight Dashboard compiles post‑hoc misconduct reports within a congressional oversight framework [5]. Independent trackers uniformly acknowledge undercounts — The Trace and newsroom analyses note that not all shootings are publicly reported — while official CBP/ICE public statistics do not systematically catalogue officer shootings for public reconciliation, creating persistent gaps between datasets [2] [7].
6. What reporting can and cannot resolve right now
Public sources make clear which projects exist and how they collect material, but none of the supplied reporting provides a single reconciled methodology document that lets one definitively harmonize totals across trackers; available coverage stresses complementary roles — public incident collection, investigative recoding, personnel exposure and congressional complaint logging — and warns readers to expect undercounts and political framing in some datasets [1] [2] [4] [5].