Beacon: ICE Activity and Education

Dedicated to giving the most recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement information Features: ICE raid live reporting, EAP's, legal counsel resources, rights page, and more.

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Inspiration

With the arrival of the Trump administration in 2025, immigration laws have become significantly more aggressive, and ICE activity remains clouded by speculation—ranging from claims of widespread arrests to a significant lack of verifiable evidence. We were struck by the shortage of publicly available data on recent ICE operations. Existing trackers, while valuable (with some of the best linked below), often struggle with limitations in recentness, accuracy, or scale.

This lack of transparency inspired us to create Beacon: ICE Activity and Education, a centralized, publicly accessible database designed to provide up-to-date, verifiable information on ICE activity.

What it does

At its core, Beacon functions as a community-driven tracker where users can submit reports detailing ICE arrests, including geolocation data and descriptions. This allows for real-time mapping of ICE activity. In addition to the tracker, we provide educational resources on ICE policies, deportation defense, and immigrant rights. We also feature a "Know Your Rights" page, ensuring individuals have access to crucial legal protections.

How we built it

backend powered by flask, front end in html and java, used mapbox api for visualizatons and maps, researched a lot of different sources on this topic.

Challenges we ran into

Cultural Awareness & Responsibility: Our team comes from non-Hispanic backgrounds and lacked direct experience with Latino immigration. We were initially hesitant to take on this project, fearing we might misrepresent the issue or fail to give it the depth and care it deserves. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, we committed significant time to research and learning, ensuring that our work genuinely supports those affected. Technical Hurdles: Building a Flask backend from scratch in such a short timeframe was a steep learning curve. We initially attempted to integrate frameworks like Bootstrap or Tailwind but had to abandon them due to time constraints. Implementing a functioning backend to support user-reported data added an extra layer of complexity—one we ultimately enjoyed tackling.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Taking the first step toward providing greater transparency in ICE operations and helping a community facing increased danger.
  • Educating the Carolina community, as well as ourselves, on ICE tactics and countermeasures.
  • Successfully integrating a backend system for handling user-submitted reports—something new for many of our team members.

What's next for Beacon: ICE Activity and Education

1) Talk with people! There are a mountain of organizations and resources throughout the US designed to help people affected by immigration policy, so getting their input on functionality for a website like ours would be the difference between adding critical functionality for those who need it. 2) Implement more functionality of existing tracker sites, like RaidsMap.org (discontinued in 2022) for it's illuminative data set, or 3) We had many more plans for functionality, including Spanish language accommodations, a chatbot that would help message a local governmental or legal representative, a map of locations ICE raids were legally inhibited/made illegal, etc. It's exciting to see how much room to grow the project is capable of for future improvements.

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