A Honolulu man was sentenced on Tuesday after agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement traced his whereabouts through records of money transfers to Mexico.
Gregorio Cordova Murrieta likely awaits deportation for illegally reentering the United States 17 years ago. He had no past criminal record.
How does his case stack up to trends in immigration enforcement here in Hawaiʻi and across the nation?
The Deportation Data Project is a group of professors and lawyers who successfully sued the federal agency for the data on ICE encounters, arrests, and detentions across the country. They’ve made their data accessible to the public.
Graeme Blair is co-director of the Deportation Data Project and an associate professor of political science at the University of California Los Angeles. He spoke with The Conversation's Maddie Bender about the project and how President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are being felt across the country and in Hawaiʻi.
Interview highlights
On informing the public about immigration enforcement
GRAEME BLAIR: We wanted to be able to put data about each instance of immigration enforcement, whether that's an arrest or a detention of an immigrant or deportation, and to be able to put those in the hands of journalists who can communicate them to the public as well as interested people. So you can download off of our website Excel spreadsheets that have a list of anonymized data that protects immigrants privacy, but that allows you to look at step-by-step what happens to each person that is entangled into the immigration enforcement system. And I think our hope is that that can be used both to inform people and also to be directly used in court cases and in lobbying of the government about what people think those policies should be, and just to seed conversations about what Americans think immigration policy should look like.
On how the project got access to data from ICE
BLAIR: The request that ended up getting a bunch of the data from ICE was in early 2024 and in the fall when we got this group together, we tried to look for the request that was most ready to be challenged, and they had not responded to that request at all. And so the only option that you have then is to take them to court, and so we filed a lawsuit in the late fall asking for ICE to produce that information, with the idea that then that would kind of work its way through the court system and potentially produce data after inauguration. And we've been lucky that that did work out. And so I've been able to produce data in March, and then in June and July about what's been going on in the immigration enforcement system.
On patterns from the arrests
BLAIR: One important one is that a large majority of those arrested have no criminal conviction, and many have never even been charged with a crime. And that's true in Hawaiʻi as well. And that is in contrast with how the Trump administration is talking about how it's using immigration enforcement, which is that they say that they're going after the "worst of the worst." And that's not what the data say. The data say that not only are most people not charged with any crime, but most of the people that are charged with a crime are for pretty minor charges. According to CBS analysis of the data, only 8% of detainees had convictions for violent crimes, which is what I think of when I think of the "worst of the worst" in their mind. And in fact, the largest category of people were arrested for traffic offenses. And so when I think, when Americans think about what kinds of people are being detained in this system, I don't think they're thinking about people who had a broken tail light or got a speeding offense, and that seems to be a large portion of what's going on in terms of arrests and detentions. … We've also found that people are being transferred frequently and to increasingly far away locations. So people are being taken far from their homes and far from their own legal representation, which makes it a lot harder to fight their deportation, and that government offices are being used for the large-scale detention of immigrants. People are not supposed to be held in small rooms. There are lots of regulations about what kinds of conditions people are allowed to be held in, and the government is systematically violating those. So that's been documented in New York and in a range of other places.
On the importance of having both data and stories about immigration
BLAIR: I think we kind of have to have both, because I think it's hard for humans to grasp really large numbers and to see patterns in data, and so being able to have your hands around the story I think requires both understanding individual stories, which can help us illustrate what's happening, but we also need to know how common those stories are. … But it was also important then to be able to document in the data, which a number of journalists have, how common it is for people to be transferred far away from their home, how far away they're being taken, how long they're being kept there. And what those journalists were able to document was this is really common, but there are a lot of people that are being taken far away and that are being held there for significant periods of time. And I think we really need both to understand, kind of on a human level, what these experiences are like, and then we need to be able to document how common they are to decide as a country — is this the policy that we want to have?
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 10, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
