Amid the blinding pace of immigration news and policy changes unfolding under the second Trump administration, data can cut through the chaos and bring clarity.
To that end, Early Arrival is welcoming Austin Kocher — a leading expert on U.S. immigration data — as a monthly newsletter columnist.
As covered in an earlier interview with Documented, Kocher, a data researcher, geographer and Substack writer, has spent nearly two decades studying the U.S. immigration enforcement system on the national level.
In his new column, which will run once a month in the Early Arrival newsletter, Kocher will distill and localize data to focus on New York City, with the aim of helping readers make sense of the current immigration system, through numbers.
Early Arrival chatted with Kocher about how he got started digging into immigration data, and what he hopes readers will take away from the new column.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Julia Malleck: Hi Austin, we’re excited to have your expertise featured in Early Arrival! To start off, tell us a bit about your background in data analysis.
Austin Kocher: My bachelor’s, master’s degree, and PhD are all in geography, but before I was a geography undergraduate student, I was a chemistry major. I thought I was going to go into the medical sciences, and because of that, I had to take a lot of math and statistics, and applied math and statistics.
When I went over to the social sciences at Ohio State University, my focus was in human geography, a very critical, theory-heavy, very qualitative kind of field. But because I already came in with those math skills, I really didn’t get caught up in those distinctions.
So, when there was an opportunity to take, let’s say, police records that we received through public records requests in North Carolina, looking at immigration enforcement by local law enforcement, it was the most natural thing, to me, to take that and turn it into structured data, and then see what we could learn. What time of day were law enforcement stopping people in immigrant neighborhoods? Could we measure how many stops actually happen in Latino neighborhoods versus non-Latino neighborhoods? Things like that.
And then I started working at TRAC at Syracuse University. I had to adapt my skillset to learning programming more and learning how to manage really large, really messy data sets and doing the mix of quantitative and qualitative work.
So, I started working with immigration 20 years ago, but it took time to not only build the analysis skills. I started talking to people, and I was interested in how people were impacted by the deportation system, and that line of questioning I found was dramatically helped by being able to look at immigration data.
What can data tell us about the current immigration crackdown that we can’t learn elsewhere?
The kind of data that we have on immigration enforcement and deportation comes from the federal government itself. So, the first thing I always emphasize with everyone who wants to understand is that this is not data that we’re collecting for research purposes. This is data that the government itself is generated as a part of its routine operations, which means everything that we’re able to say about enforcement comes from the enforcement agency we’re talking about. This is coming from ICE. It’s coming from DHS, and so that’s really powerful in terms of understanding what’s happening.
The second thing that is important is that the data can give us a much more holistic and non-politicized view of what the government is doing from the perspective of the information the government has.
There’s often really good data on key enforcement categories. It tells us about how much of a priority someone is, according to the agency itself. It tells us about whether someone has a criminal history, according to what the government knows at the time. It tells us how long someone was in detention or if they’ve been deported, and what all that means is we’re often forced to just rely on first-person stories and eyewitness accounts, which is really important when we’re trying to understand mass deportation or what mass deportation looks like.
But that doesn’t really give us a good understanding of whether what we are seeing with our own eyes represents a broader section of reality. We don’t know if we’re only seeing an outlier, or if we’re seeing something that’s really common.
And this is even more important right now, because there’s so much about enforcement that we don’t see. If ICE isn’t out in communities en masse, like it was in Minneapolis, people are getting arrested at ICE check-ins, or ICE is knocking on the door and picking people up. And so not everything ICE does is intended to be visible.
So, the data also helps us to see all the things that we can’t see with our own eyes. I find that really important. Data can challenge our assumptions
What are some examples of immigration data stories you’ve covered recently?
The big one for me recently has been the massive growth in people dying inside of ICE detention facilities. This is obviously a very heavy topic, and it represents the tip of the iceberg of the kind of consequences of poor conditions inside these facilities.
There are many people who do not die in ICE custody, but face all kinds of physical and psychological and emotional consequences as a result of detention, and those stories are not always told because they’re more difficult to report, and ICE isn’t required to report every almost-death. They are required to report every death that happens while in custody.
But even within that, what I’ve found is that the data on it is much more complicated than what it seems. There’s a lot of messiness around where people died and how people died. There’s many conflicting accounts of the cause of death, and ICE is often not entirely consistent themselves. And even when additional investigations and findings and reports provide more detail, sometimes those details conflict with ICE’s initial reporting.
So this is a data story that is a very human story. It’s a very difficult story, but it’s also a story that I think is important to document because it’s important to create a record.
What can readers expect from your column?
Readers can expect me to do what I’ve done for most of my career, which is to take complicated and controversial issues about immigration that are in the news right now, and break it down using data, make it legible in a way that people can engage with productively, can prompt new questions, can hopefully give people a sense of clarity in what is otherwise a really murky and often very polarizing national discourse around immigration, and to do that consistently.
A lot of what I write about are national trends, and what attracts me to doing this particular column is I really get to focus on America’s preeminent city, New York City, which is a city with a long immigrant history, a large immigrant population, and a lot of people, immigrant and non-immigrant, who care about this issue — and may care about what’s happening on the national scale, but really want to understand what’s going on locally.
Part of what I will do in this column is not just write about national trends, but to localize the data and connect it to what New Yorkers care about.
What are you hoping readers will take away from your column?
I hope readers take three things away from my column. One is, I hope to prompt curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the antidotes, if not the antidote, to polarization and misinformation. I think that being curious and having an open and informed mind helps negate that pull into polarization and into the rabbit hole of misinformation and conspiracy theories. So curiosity is one.
The second is compassion, and I mean compassion in a really broad sense. Obviously, I think that we need compassion more than ever for immigrants in this country, immigrants who have gone through the citizenship process and are citizens now, immigrants who are in the country on a visa, and immigrants who aren’t in the country lawfully, all of whom face enormous challenges and are living through a period of really sincere fear.
But I also mean compassion for everyone, compassion for our elected officials, compassion for people writing about the issue, compassion for, you know, people who we don’t agree with. Compassion for voters who don’t have a lot of experience with the immigration system, and would like to do the right thing, but maybe you know don’t always have access to the best information.
So curiosity, compassion, and the last thing I would say is community. One of the reasons that I am excited about writing specifically for New Yorkers and writing for a more local and regional audience is, as much as it is important to change our federal laws and our federal systems, I just really, truly believe that the place that we can make a difference very practically is in our communities — and our community could be our block, it could be our family and social network, it could be our faith community, it could be our city.
Localizing data and helping people to understand how immigration enforcement is impacting the New York City-area, I hope will be one step toward understanding. Giving people the tools, equipping people with the information, so that they can take informed action in their community, in a way that I can’t because I’m just one person.
But if five people or 20 people or 100 people read some of the things that I’ll be writing about in the next few months and can find creative ways to turn that into action in their community, that’s a radical difference. That’s real progress.
