Last week I published the leaked proposal. Today I’m releasing the tool I built to watch the whole country.

Sabot Consulting posted a job opening for an “ICE Detention Compliance Operations Consultant” in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The posting included language about “facility activation” — meaning a facility is being prepared for ICE use. At the same moment, Broward County was carrying a $190 million budget overspend flagged by the state CFO. The county already holds six IGSA detention facilities, multiple 287(g) agreements signed between 2019 and 2025, and $121 million in GEO Group contracts.

That is not six separate things.

That is one thing, appearing in six places. A county in fiscal distress. A private consultant staffed by former ICE officials. A job posting signaling a facility is being prepared. Multiple enforcement agreements already locked in. A private prison company already being paid.

The Detention Pipeline tracks 3,992 signals like these across 1,988 U.S. counties, scored by convergence.

detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org

The Shift This Tracks

Last week I published the Bradford County briefing document: a leaked Sabot Consulting proposal for a 3,000-bed detention campus in rural Florida, designed with “opaque fencing and muted external signage” to avoid looking like what it is. The county would hold the lease. A private operator would run the facility. ICE would pay for beds. The federal government would have detention capacity without a federal contract to FOIA.

The shift was strategic. Distribute the buildout across hundreds of counties and it becomes invisible — no single large federal contract for congressional oversight to track, no single point of accountability, no facility prominent enough to attract sustained national attention.

The tactic assumes the public cannot watch that many counties at once.

The site is the answer to that assumption.

What It Shows

The heat map is the front door. Every U.S. county is scored by signal convergence — existing IGSA facilities, 287(g) agreements, Alaska Native Corporation contracts, ICE contract awards, commission activity, sheriff network ties, consultant job postings, communications discipline patterns, budget distress, real estate traces, legislative footprints.

Three different signal types in one county are far more predictive than ten entries of the same type. The scoring rewards convergence: the more independent signals point at the same county, the higher it scores. A high score means multiple independent indicators are converging — it does not mean a deal is confirmed. What it does with certainty is tell you where to look.

Broward County, Florida: 186. Miami-Dade: 178. Webb County, Texas: 174. Wayne County, Michigan: 165, with eight independent signal types — commission activity, communications discipline, and a real estate trace alongside seven existing IGSA agreements and active ANC contracts.

Click a county and see the signals. Click a signal and see the source. Click a contractor and see the revolving-door record. 1,189 IGSA facilities are indexed with operators, contract types, and conditions records. 25 contractors are profiled with individual dossiers. Tae Johnson — until July 2023, Acting Director of ICE — is now on Sabot’s criminal justice team. It’s documented.

The timeline shows when the acceleration began — and it’s not subtle. The 287(g) program grew from 135 agreements to over 1,600 in fourteen months. The stacked bars break down by signal type. Filter by state, zoom to weekly or daily resolution.

Four Ways to Use It

If you’re fighting a proposal in your county, start at the action guide. Five steps drawn from the communities that have already won. The FOIA generator produces ready-to-send public records requests targeted at the specific signals showing up in your county — you fill in your name, it generates the letters. Seven counties have blocked or paused proposals. One — the Choctaw Nation — preempted the pitch by purchasing the warehouse first. The playbook is sourced from those real fights: ten consultant tactics, nine community counter-tactics, thirteen documented cases.

If you’re reporting on detention, the network visualization maps the revolving door between government and the private detention industry, with a conflict-of-interest matrix sourced from financial disclosures. The players directory catalogs the contractors and the people moving between them.

If you’re investigating the industry, the coverage gaps page shows where the data is thinnest. Most counties have only automated signals. Local knowledge — a commission agenda item, a sheriff’s conference attendance record, an unusual zoning application — is the difference between a signal and a story.

If you’re technical, the whole thing is on GitHub under CC-BY-SA. The data layer is a public knowledge base maintained in git. Fork it, extend it, run your own instance, contribute upstream. The resources page catalogs 39 external tools, organizations, and data sources across eight categories — from bond funds to flight trackers to FOIA guides.

The Ask

Look up your county.

If the heat score is low, check the coverage gaps page first. Low scores often mean low coverage, not low activity. The pitch to county commissioners doesn’t always make the local paper. The warehouse purchase is often filed as a routine zoning variance.

If the heat score is high, the signals are listed and sourced. What the site cannot see is what is happening in your city council meetings, on your county commission agendas, in the hallway conversations at your sheriff’s department. That local knowledge is what converts a signal into a story. The contribute page explains how to submit it. Every verified submission updates the county’s coverage depth.

One journalist cannot maintain 1,988 counties. One activist cannot attend 1,988 commission meetings. But the people who live in those counties already know what is happening in their commission chambers. The site is the infrastructure for that knowledge to become visible — county by county, signal by signal, source by source.

The detention buildout was engineered to outrun scrutiny. The tactic assumed the public couldn’t watch this many places at once.

The tactic was wrong.

The RAMM is a reader-supported investigation. The Detention Pipeline at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org is the data layer for the reporting. Paid subscribers get draft chapters of the book and access to the research infrastructure.