The site launched with 13 documented county fights. Within hours, the heatmap had guided me to 20. By the end of the first day, visitor traffic pointed me to stories I hadn’t covered — and I now have 83 fights documented across 38 states.

Here’s how it worked. The heatmap scores every county based on detention contracts, 287(g) agreements, and budget distress signals. Those scores told me where to look first. But then something unexpected happened: people started visiting, and their browsing patterns told me where to look next. Someone spent three minutes on Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Someone else read every word on four southern Oregon counties. A visitor in the DC area studied Arlington, Virginia’s surveillance infrastructure.

Every one of those signals led to a significant finding. People were telling me where to research just by what they looked at.

Minnesota

The Minnesota story — Operation Metro Surge, the Woodbury and Shakopee warehouse fights, the Appleton reactivation attempt — has been extensively covered by the Star Tribune, MPR, and national outlets. What I’ve done is add all of it to the tracking system: three blocked facility proposals, the 287(g) proliferation across eight rural county jails, and the legal challenges (AG opinion, ACLU injunction, HF 3060 legislation) that are testing whether sheriffs can sign these agreements unilaterally.

Visitor traffic pointed me to what wasn’t well-covered: the rural jail network. Kandiyohi County has quietly become Minnesota’s largest ICE detention site — 150 of 190 beds dedicated to ICE under a 22-year contract. Crow Wing County’s sheriff signed dual 287(g) agreements without county board approval. In Worthington, the American Prospect documented how fear alone devastated the local economy without a single raid at the JBS plant. And ICE is transferring detainees to Nebraska and Iowa, hundreds of miles from attorneys and immigration courts.

Colorado: Nine Hold Rooms

Someone browsed ten Colorado counties in one session. What brought them there was likely the Colorado Times Recorder’s March 2026 investigation revealing that ICE operates nine hold rooms across the state — unofficial detention sites in office buildings, strip malls, and bank buildings. 2,831 people held from January through October 2025, ages 1 to 91.

The formal system — Aurora ICE Processing Center, GEO Group, $70M expansion, malnutrition documented at 198 calories per lunch — is well-reported. What I added to the tracker is the convergence: the busiest hold room (DENHOLD, 1,400 people in ten months, owned by a Virginia investment firm collecting $2.2M in federal rent) sits in the same county where I found a “Detention Medical Center Expansion Tour” on the March 17 commission agenda via Legistar. Three new facilities would triple Colorado’s formal detention capacity.

When Adams County tried to inspect the Aurora facility, GEO Group blocked them. When Adams County complied with Colorado’s sanctuary law, ICE retaliated by revoking body writs — refusing to transport detainees to court appearances. That deliberate degradation of criminal prosecution in non-cooperating jurisdictions is a pattern worth tracking.

South Carolina: 3 to 37

Fourteen visitors searched South Carolina in the first day — more than any state except the homepage. They found thin coverage. That’s been corrected.

South Carolina went from 3 to 37 law enforcement agencies with 287(g) agreements in twelve months. The state House voted 85-30 to require every law enforcement agency operating a jail to join 287(g) — with every public testifier opposed and no member of the public in favor.

What the coverage hadn’t focused on: Charleston County produced 881 ICE arrests in nine months — roughly 30% of all South Carolina immigration arrests from a single county. A secret hold room in the Strom Thurmond Federal Building in Richland County has operated since 2014 without city leaders’ knowledge. 416 people detained in 2025, up 150% from the Biden era. South Carolina has built full-stack enforcement infrastructure in the Midlands — street enforcement in Charleston, jail processing in Lexington, secret detention in Richland — and it’s now in the tracker.

Indiana: The Midwest Hub

Internal DHS documents show Indianapolis under consideration for a warehouse conversion holding 7,000 to 10,000 detainees. The Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill already activated with 1,000 ICE beds. Three layers assembling in a single metro: county jail overflow, state prison conversion, and a proposed warehouse mega-center. Added to the tracker.

Oklahoma: Blocked Twice

Two warehouse proposals blocked within weeks. In OKC, community protests killed a 416,000-square-foot warehouse deal. In Durant, the Choctaw Nation purchased the targeted warehouse — a sovereign tribal nation directly blocking federal detention infrastructure. Behind it: an enforcement economy estimated at $175M annually. More than 730 Highway Patrol troopers hold 287(g) agreements. At the Tulsa County Jail, 80% of ICE detainees had no prior convictions.

Oregon: 1,100 Arrests in a Sanctuary State

Oregon has been a sanctuary state since 1987. ICE arrested 1,100 people there in 2025. The formal infrastructure is well-documented nationally. What visitor traffic pointed me to was the southern Oregon story: the surveillance sharing through the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” the cannabis-raid-as-ICE-sweep in Jackson County where a GEO transport bus was pre-staged before raids began, and Coos County where ICE scouted three sites after Newport rejected them. The commission voted 2-1 against cooperation, but the door was left open. All of it is now tracked.

Virginia, New Mexico, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Sacramento

I added coverage for all of these — CoreCivic’s $71.4M acquisition of Farmville; New Mexico’s statewide ban on 287(g); Idaho’s Canyon County racetrack raid (400 detained including U.S. citizens, class-action filed); Nevada’s live Supreme Court case challenging LVMPD’s 287(g); Wyoming’s distributed jail strategy after the WyoSayNo campaign blocked a dedicated facility; Sacramento’s John Moss Federal Building where Congresswoman Matsui was physically blocked from inspecting.

Each fight page is sourced and documented. The point isn’t to break these stories — most are well-reported. The point is to put them in the system so the convergence patterns are visible.

83 county fights documented. 38 states investigated. 1,998 counties scored. The coverage gaps page shows where the data is still thin. The map shows the full picture.

Data current as of April 13, 2026. The Detention Pipeline is at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org.