How we extracted thousands of records from Florida’s immigration dashboard

An investigation into Florida’s immigration surveillance system found that law enforcement officers have submitted tens of thousands of people they suspect may be in the country without authorization to a state database — including hundreds of minors and thousands of people with no known criminal background. The reporting also found officers routinely submitted people whose citizenship status they could not confirm.

Read More: Grandmothers, landscapers, even kids, swept into state’s shadowy immigration database

To examine the system, reporters reviewed data collected from state and local law enforcement agencies by the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement.

The state makes some of that information available through a public dashboard, but it is limited to charts and summaries. More detailed records on every encounter are available for a rolling 90-day window hidden behind a summary bar chart in a section called “Last 90 Days” and accessible only by right-clicking the chart.

To collect those more detailed records, reporters used Claude to build a scraper that captured the encounter-level data daily, then compiled it in a spreadsheet.

Each row represents a unique encounter and includes specific fields not visible in the dashboard. Those fields include the reporting agency, the county and city of the encounter, the person’s country of citizenship, gender, arrest status, and whether U.S. Immigration and Enforcement was contacted.

Reporters pulled data from March 14 through Aug. 10. The reconstructed database contains details for about 10,890 individual encounters. Kara Newhouse, deputy data editor at the University of Maryland Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, fact-checked the data collection and analysis for this story.