One week in. The site launched with 13 documented county fights across 21 states. It now has 99 fights across 44 states, 143 facility profiles, 82 research notes, and 395 local government meeting records — 17,808 entries total, scoring 1,192 counties.

The most important thing that happened this week wasn’t what we found. It was how we found it.

The Feedback Loop

People started visiting county pages. We could see where they went and how long they stayed. Someone in South Carolina spent 90 seconds reading Charleston County with 90% scroll depth. Someone in Oregon read four southern Oregon counties back to back, spending nearly three minutes on Coos County. Someone in Minnesota spent three full minutes on Crow Wing County. A visitor in rural Missouri read Ripley County for six minutes and forty-eight seconds.

Every one of those signals led to a significant finding. The people visiting this site know things about their communities that haven’t been reported. Their browsing patterns told us where to look. We researched it. Every time, we found something.

This is the core of how the site works now: the heatmap tells us where signals are. Visitors tell us where the signals matter most. We investigate. The findings go back into the system. The cycle continues.

New States

Five states that had never been researched are now documented:

Arkansas passed the first mandatory 287(g) law in the country — Act 654 requires every sheriff to apply for an ICE partnership. Forty agencies have signed. Benton County alone produced 450 ICE arrests in nine months, accounting for 4% of all 287(g) arrests nationally from a single county jail. And on the governor’s 815-acre prison site in Franklin County, the chief deputy caught three ICE agents from New Orleans scouting the property alongside the governor’s special adviser. “We can have this up very quickly,” an agent said. “We’ll put a temporary one up first.”

Idaho’s biggest story is the Wilder racetrack raid — 200+ officers raided a Sunday family horse racing event, detained 400 people including U.S. citizens and children, used flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets, and sorted people by skin color. The ACLU filed Rodriguez v. Porter as a class action. Idaho’s ICE arrests rose 797% in one year.

Nevada has a live Supreme Court case filed April 9 that could void all four of the state’s 287(g) agreements. In Nye County, the cautionary tale: a jail that subsidized ICE by $4 million a year from its general fund, failed an audit for having no potable water, and voted 5-0 to terminate.

Wyoming shows the counter-strategy to warehouse fights. After the WyoSayNo campaign defeated a 1,000-bed CoreCivic facility, ICE distributed detention across county jails — lower visibility, same result. The Highway Patrol signed a statewide 287(g) making any traffic stop a potential immigration enforcement action.

Montana’s story is state preemption. Helena passed a sanctuary resolution. The Attorney General opened an investigation, threatened $10,000 fines every five days. The commission rescinded it 4-1 within two months.

Visitor-Driven Discoveries

These are stories we found because someone’s browsing told us where to look.

Southern Oregon: Three Ways to Hollow Out Sanctuary Law

A visitor read four southern Oregon county pages with extraordinary engagement. What we found: an entire surveillance network — the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” an informal intelligence-sharing arrangement between crime analysts in Jackson, Josephine, Douglas, and Klamath counties that shared license plate reader data directly with ICE. In Jackson County, DEA cannabis raids became the pretext for 17 ICE arrests — a GEO Group transport bus was pre-staged before the raids began. ICE’s Medford field office sits in a county-owned building leased through a private intermediary at $0.28 per square foot. Oregon has been a sanctuary state since 1987.

Minnesota: Enforcement Spreads North

Someone spent three minutes on Crow Wing County. Another systematically read seven Minnesota county pages. What they knew: ICE enforcement has spread from the Twin Cities into a network of rural county jails. Kandiyohi County quietly became 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 board approval. And detainees are being transferred to Nebraska and Iowa, hundreds of miles from attorneys.

Pima County, Arizona: The Sheriff Who Got Caught

Three visitors studied Pima County. The finding: Sheriff Chris Nanos publicly claimed his department doesn’t cooperate with ICE. The ACLU proved otherwise — deputies offered people a ride to Taco Bell, then called Border Patrol to meet them there. The department stopped tracking immigration contacts while the tracking policy was still in effect. The Board of Supervisors has demanded a sworn report by April 21 or threatened removal. Meanwhile, a 513-bed former state prison in Marana is being reopened as an ICE detention center by MTC — a contractor fired from its last Arizona prison for systemic failures — on a sole-source, no-bid contract.

Pittsburgh: The 287(g) Flip-Flops

Three visitors came from the Pittsburgh area. What we documented: ICE arrests tripled to 1,425, the County Council voted 11-3 to ban ICE cooperation, but small municipalities are signing 287(g) agreements in secret — then reversing when the press finds out, then sometimes re-signing. Stowe Township signed without the commission’s knowledge, reversed after media inquiry, re-signed a week later. The sheriff’s deputies helped ICE locate people in the courthouse under a protocol designed to happen “out of public view.”

Missouri Ozarks: Rural Jails Competing for ICE Contracts

Someone in Ripley County, Missouri spent six minutes and forty-eight seconds on a county page with a heat score of 11. The adjacent counties told the story: Greene County Jail in Springfield holds 233 ICE detainees — 96% on civil violations, no criminal charges — under a contract worth potentially $9 million a year. Ozark County signed at $110 per night plus $1.10 per mile for transport. Rural jails across the Ozarks are competing for ICE contracts as an economic lifeline. The Marshall Project documented the pattern. Ripley County itself remains a mystery — flagged for a FOIA request.

Enriched Coverage

Several states that were already documented got significantly deeper based on visitor signals:

South Carolina remained the most-visited state page all week. We added county-level detail for the three Midlands counties visitors kept returning to: Charleston’s 881 arrests in nine months with documented racial profiling, Lexington’s churning of 781 detainees through 12 beds, and a secret hold room in the Strom Thurmond Federal Building that city leaders didn’t know existed.

Colorado got deeper on two counties visitors studied intensely: the DENHOLD hold room — 1,400 people processed through a bedless office building, children as young as one — and Adams County’s multi-front fight where ICE retaliated against sanctuary compliance by refusing to transport detainees to court.

Kentucky was refreshed after five visitors all bounced from the state page — they wanted county-level jail data we didn’t have. The overview now documents 1,041 average daily ICE detainees across 11 jails, 72% held on non-criminal violations, and the Oldham County open records victory.

Ohio was updated with findings from the ACLU’s March 2026 “ICE in Ohio” report — someone was cross-referencing our data against it. New: Franklin County courthouse arrests (20 people detained inside the courthouse) and Clermont County signing 287(g) for zero reimbursement.

New Data Feeds

The automated ingestion pipeline pulled 395 local government meeting records from 79 Legistar portals across 25 states. Notable volumes: Louisville Metro (59 matching agenda items), Kansas City (87), Pittsburgh (27), El Dorado County (8), Concord NH (8). These are county commissions, city councils, and budget committees discussing ICE contracts, detention facility proposals, sanctuary resolutions, and enforcement cooperation. Each one is now in the system, linked to its county page.

Site Improvements

For the people using the site as a research tool:

• County search is now in the navigation bar on every page. Type a county name, get autocomplete results with heat scores. Press / to focus it.
• Signal type explanations appear as tooltips when you hover over labels like “IGSA” or “287(g)” on county pages.
• The map legend now shows what colors and symbols mean without hovering.
• Heat score accuracy improved: state-level research entries no longer inflate individual county scores. A note about South Carolina doesn’t make every SC county look well-researched.
• “Start Here” actually works now. It was a 404 for the first day.

The Tips Started Coming In

Then the loop closed all the way. Five people filed tips through the site’s GitHub submission forms in a single day.

A user in New Jersey flagged the Roxbury warehouse fight — we already had it documented. “You may already have this,” they wrote. We did, and their tip confirmed the coverage is reaching the right communities.

A woman named Brandy Armstrong in Mississippi submitted meeting minutes URLs for three counties: Adams (YouTube recordings of board meetings — this is the county with the 2,260-bed CoreCivic facility), Harrison (PDF agendas going back years), and Hancock (CivicClerk portal with minutes and video). Primary source material for ongoing monitoring of three counties where ICE detention is actively expanding.

And then this, from someone in South Carolina:

“14 Apr 2026 Carolina Courier post: Reader reports of ICE operations in North Charleston this morning near the Cosgrove Bridge. ICE involvement unconfirmed, though readers report masked officers taking multiple Hispanic males into custody.”

They included photos. North Charleston — the same area where we documented racial profiling in traffic stop operations going back to November 2025. The tip was filed the same day the operation happened. It’s now in the timeline as the most recent incident in a documented pattern.

This is what the site was built for. Not just data flowing down to communities, but intelligence flowing back up. The heatmap finds the signals. Visitors show us where to look. The research confirms what they already suspected. And then they come back with what they see on the ground.

What’s Next

The coverage page shows where we’re thin. The map shows where the signals are. The tip forms are on every county page. And if you visit a county page and spend three minutes reading it, we’ll know something is happening there.

Every page you visit tells us something. Every tip closes the loop.

Data current as of April 16, 2026. 17,808 entries across 1,192 scored counties. The Detention Pipeline is at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org.