Jake Lawrence · STS / Public Data / Civic Epistemics · Field Data theme
A methodology inventory for claims about U.S. immigration enforcement. Not an argument: twenty-one talking points from both directions mapped to the sources that would settle them, the four counting decisions that flip verdicts, and a status board for the official series that have gone dark. The best current data on ICE is adversarial (litigation-driven FOIA, independent clearinghouses), not official.
The counting-rules arm of the field-data program. A sourced, content-as-code inventory of what can and cannot be known about ICE from public data, 2003 to the run date: a twenty-one-claim register under symmetric scrutiny (enforcement-critical and enforcement-favorable claims get the identical compute / stress-test / counter-consideration treatment), a provenance ledger across five source tiers with per-source currency status, the four measurement traps (agency attribution, removal terminology, criminality definitions, the modeled population denominator), and a comparability timeline of series-breaking changes. The signature interaction is a denominator switcher: hold the claim constant, swap the counting convention, and watch the verdict flip in place, because when a verdict flips under a defensible alternative, the instability is the finding. Built from a fact-checked corpus (58 assertions independently verified, then a resolution addendum) whose corrected files ship in the repo; every figure re-derives in the browser and in CI. Aggregates and public records only, no individual dossiers, normative claims labeled and left unadjudicated.
Two field-data studies of the state counting (or not counting) its own coercive functions. Counting the Killings found the state unable to count the people its police kill, leaving a newspaper to build the authoritative number; How Would I Know? finds a state that can count immigration enforcement and, in 2025-2026, increasingly declined to publish, leaving litigation-driven FOIA and a clearinghouse to carry the record.
Classification as Infrastructure names the pattern: the category system does the argumentative work while staying invisible. How Would I Know? makes it operable. Interior vs border, removal vs return, conviction vs pending charge: flip any one counting convention in the switcher and a national talking point's verdict flips with it.
Two field-data readings of what a state's records can support. The Legibility Gap measures what Ukraine's wartime registry cannot read about its own damaged homes; How Would I Know? measures what America's public record can and cannot settle about its own immigration enforcement, down to the four counting rules doing the quiet work.
What the State Keeps reads the federal state as a classified inventory evaluated from above. How Would I Know? catalogs one agency's inventory going dark in real time: a congressionally mandated report frozen, a dashboard stopped, an annual report missing, and the best remaining data held by the state's adversaries in litigation.
Two civic field-data studies built on the same discipline: public records only, every figure sourced and dated, conservative on conflicts. Pingree Grove Studies makes one village legible to its residents; How Would I Know? maps what the national immigration-enforcement record can make legible to anyone, and marks where it goes dark.
Thirteen claims about immigration enforcement under symmetric scrutiny, mapped to primary sources, with a frozen run date. Subscribe and you hear when the register is refreshed or a source series goes dark. It is the one list for the whole site, so you will get the rest of the work too. No schedule, easy out.
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