When Donald Trump promised "mass deportations" at the start of his second term, he insisted he would target the "worst of the worst". The Guardian set out to verify exactly who was being swept up in the enforcement dragnet.
The answer lay in government paperwork. Each time an immigration agent makes an arrest, they complete an I-213 form, officially called a "Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien" document. These forms allege unauthorized status and become the evidentiary foundation the Department of Homeland Security uses in court to prove illegal presence.
Obtaining those forms proved difficult. After the Trump administration failed to respond to direct records requests, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a legal nonprofit serving journalists, filed suit on the Guardian's behalf. Months of litigation yielded what the government had resisted sharing: a series of spreadsheets extracted from I-213 forms spanning fiscal year 2023 through August 2025.
The data contained biographical snapshots of each arrested individual, including criminal histories and information about dependent children under 18. The Guardian processed and released the documents publicly after removing potentially identifying details, making the raw material available to other newsrooms, researchers, and advocacy groups.
The spreadsheets became essential to investigating the administration's actual enforcement patterns. Rather than accepting official claims at face value, the Guardian used the I-213 data to examine what convictions arrestees actually carried and how the deportation campaign fractured families.
To measure family separation specifically, journalists cross-referenced the I-213 records with data released by the Deportation Data Project, a team of academics and lawyers at the University of California, Berkeley. By matching records from both datasets using apprehension dates, area of responsibility, age, gender, and apprehension site, the Guardian successfully aligned 86% of the I-213 forms with unique entries in the Berkeley database.
The merged dataset allowed for month-by-month tracking of how many parents were arrested and deported, alongside counts of affected children. This combination gave the reporting scope and specificity that either dataset alone could not have provided.
Author James Rodriguez: "These forms exist to justify deportations in court, but they also document who's actually being removed and why. When a government resists releasing this basic information, that resistance itself becomes newsworthy."
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