United States Disappeared Tracker

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/danielleharlow/viz/UnitedStatesDisappearedTracker/Map

by cratermoon • 1 year ago

82 14 1 year ago

public.tableau.com

While it's good thing a site like this exists but the more important question here, one which should have also been answered more than 80 years ago is, what can one do about it? "First they came for ...". Yes we know they came for a bunch of people, but what can I, you or anyone do about it? Anybody got any idea?

pas3• 1 year ago

support moderate candidates in races where they have a chance.

https://www.slowboring.com/i/157620293/be-the-change

also note that the general public is very Republican when it comes to immigration https://www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-cant-hide-from-immigr...

jfengel• 1 year ago

They had a chance, back in November. They were told very clearly that this was the outcome.

I don't see anybody changing their vote.

CalRobert• 1 year ago

Relying on tableau seems like it exposes the project to risk of shut down. Salesforce certainly is prone to pressure. Self hosted metabase or superset would be more resilient

declan_roberts2• 1 year ago

"Disappeared"? Maybe I'm too old but this millennial podcast talk is really cringe to me.

This appears to be a map of people awaiting deportation.

unsnap_biceps• 1 year ago

No, the map is of the folks that ended up in a detainment facility in a foreign country without being processed in the judicial system. The majority are in the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador.

People are calling it "Disappeared" because once the people are out of the United States, they're out of United States judicial jurisdiction and administrative jurisdiction. ICE will not arrange for family to communicate with the deported people, so in their eyes, the person has just disappeared and they can't communicate with them.

As a country, we're better than this. Deporting them back to their home country is great. Going up to a judge and getting a conviction if we want to jail them, great. Taking them off the street and putting them in a jail in a country they're not a citizen of without going in front of a judge? No. That's not right at all.

timeon• 1 year ago

Sure 'deportation' is more fitting. As it was already in 1940s.

declan_roberts2• 1 year ago

Did history start and end for you in WWII?

pas3• 1 year ago

deportation is a legal process, this is people getting snatched on the streets.

it did not start this month [1], ICE was always a big fucking void of basic civility, but that does not change the nature of these renditions.

people held at these facilities usually have a good chance of getting a habeas corpus hearing in front of a federal court after 6-12 months.

the federal courts are completely aware that the Immigration Courts (part of DoJ) are extremely backlogged. (which is ... a funding issue of course. which is again a direct consequence of how Congress views people.)

since these detention facilities are run for-profit it makes sense for ICE to prioritize dealing with cases that the courts "highlight".

this makes "everyone" happy, ICE makes the numbers, the contractors are happy, what else could you wish for? [2]

[1] ICE/DHS in 2009 determined he's a citizen, then changed its position in 2016, and now claims that he never got citizenship because of a change of the constitution of El Salvador in 1983 ... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/man-detained-ice-claims-...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/ice-arrested-and-detaine...

cratermoon• 1 year ago

But "disappeared" is not a millennial term. It's been around at least since the Central American wars of the 1980s, mostly referring to events in El Salvador. Earlier references suggest it was used in the Northern Ireland in the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforced_disappearance

palmotea2• 1 year ago

The term "disappeared" refers to someone who was kidnapped and murdered clandestinely and extra-judicially (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforced_disappearance). This website is tracking legally questionable deportation actions. Those are very much not the same.

So this tracker is misinformation, due to the misuse of language.

That doesn't mean these deportations aren't bad and wrong, it's that distinctions are important. It's the same issue if someone police organization decided to start calling everyone convicted of a crime (even a traffic violation) a murderer, so they could brag about how many murders they've caught.

the_gastropod• 1 year ago

The very first sentence in this wikipedia article:

An enforced disappearance (or forced disappearance) is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law

This sounds very much like what's happening, with maybe the exception of "refusal to acknowledge the person's fate". Is that your gripe? That we know they've been sent to a country outside the protection of the law?

palmotea2• 1 year ago

The very first sentence in this wikipedia article:

If you're going to lawyer from the Wikipedia article, don't selectively quote from it. There's the rest of that paragraph:

Often, forced disappearance implies murder whereby a victim is abducted, may be illegally detained, and is often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and the body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability as there is no evidence of the victim's death.
This sounds very much like what's happening, with maybe the exception of "refusal to acknowledge the person's fate". Is that your gripe? That we know they've been sent to a country outside the protection of the law?

Where's the secrecy? There's literal court case about the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador. Where's the "refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts"? They're in El Salvador or that Louisiana immigration detention center. But more importantly: where's the torture, where's the murder, where's the secret disposal of the bodies?

There's bad stuff going on here, but call a spade a spade, don't exaggerate it into a flame-throwing battle-axe.

United States Disappeared Tracker

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