ICE Detention Facilities Scraper

ICE Detention Facilities Data Scraper and Enricher, a Python script managed by the Open Security Mapping Project.

In short this will help identify the online profile of each ICE detention facility. Please see the project home page for more about mapping these facilities and other detailed info sources.

This script scrapes ICE detention facility data from ICE.gov and enriches it with information from Wikipedia, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap.

The main purpose right now is to identify if the detention facilities have data on Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, which will help with documenting the facilities appropriately. As these entries get fixed up, you should be able to see your CSV results change almost immediately.

You can also use --load-existing to leverage an existing scrape of the data from ICE.gov. This is stored in data_loader.py and includes the official current addresses of facilities. (Note ICE has been renaming known "detention center" sites to "processing center", and so on.)

It also shows the ICE "field office" managing each detention facility.

On the OpenStreetMap (OSM) CSV results, if the URL includes a "way" then it has probably identified the correctly tagged polygon. If you visit that URL you should see the courthouse or "prison grounds" way / area info. (This info can always be improved, but at least it exists.)

On Wikipedia results the result will tend to be the first hit on the list of suggested pages, if it can't find the page directly.

The script is MIT license, please feel free to fork it and/or submit patches.

The script should be compliant with these websites' rate limiting for queries.

At this point of development you probably want "enable all debugging" to see the results below.

Usage:

Run the script and by default it will put a CSV file called ice_detention_facilities_enriched.csv in the same directory.

    python main.py --scrape          # Scrape fresh data from ICE website
    python main.py --enrich          # Enrich existing data with external sources
    python main.py --scrape --enrich # Do both operations
    python main.py --help            # Show help

    # Enable Wikipedia debugging (extra col in CSV)
    python main.py --load-existing --enrich --debug-wikipedia
    # Enable all debugging (extra cols in CSV) - this is recommended right now:
    python main.py --load-existing --enrich --debug-wikipedia --debug-wikidata --debug-osm

    # With custom output file
    python main.py --load-existing --enrich --debug-wikipedia -o debug_facilities.csv

Requirements:

    pip install requests beautifulsoup4 lxml
    # or for globally managed environments, (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu)
    sudo apt install python3-requests python3-bs4 python3-lxml

Todo / Known Issues:

The enrichment on both Wikidata and Wikipedia is pretty messy & inaccurate right now. It tries to truncate common words in hopes of finding similarly named pages but this is too aggressive, and it veers way off. (That is, it's looking for places that have simpler names, like the county name instead of county + detention center). Use the debug mode to see what it is doing.
ICE scraping is not robustly tested. The image URL extraction needs some work. (should be able to get the detention center image URLs.)
OSM enrichment submits to OSM Nominatim API search with an extra comma between address number and street name.
The user-agent for running ice.gov scrape web requests calls itself 'User-Agent': 'ICE-Facilities-Research/1.0 (Educational Research Purpose)'. You can change this in scraper.py and enricher.py.
It tells some pretty inaccurate percentages in the final summary - a lot of false positives, the Wikipedia debug percent seems wrong.
The remote query rate limiting is (I think) done in series but would go faster with parallel/async processing.
This is only targeted at English (EN) Wikipedia currently, but multi-lingual page checks would help a wider audience.

Credit:

Original version by Dan Feidt (@HongPong), with assistance from various AI gizmos. (My first real Python program, please clap.)

License:

MIT License.

License

Open-Security-Mapping-Project/ice_detention_scraper

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