Community groups in Tucson have built a publicly viewable map to document immigration-related enforcement in and around the city, as migrant advocates and organizers say arrests have accelerated under President Donald Trump’s mass deportation initiative. The Tucson Migra Map allows people to document and visualize enforcement activity attributed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies, organizers said, using resident observations and other information sources. Activist Lucia Vindiola, who launched the mutual aid group La Bodega, said the tool reflects the disruption enforcement brings to daily life.
“It indicates the level of chaos and how disruptive it is to our community,” Vindiola said in a statement. Vindiola said the increased enforcement limits families’ ability to shop for groceries and supplies, describing effects on day-to-day needs rather than only on arrests. In the year since Trump took office, the AP report said immigration-related detentions have “more than tripled” in fiscal year 2025, rising from fewer than 200 in late 2024 to more than 800 by June 2025.
Dugan Meyer, one of the map’s creators, described the effort as rooted in documentation work already underway in Tucson. Meyer said the project came “out of the documentation work that Rapid Response is doing, but also around the city,” adding that it is “a community research project, community mapping project.” Meyer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona and volunteers with Tucson Rapid Response and related organizations, according to the report.
The data used for Tucson Migra Map is drawn from spreadsheets maintained since January 2025 that track and document federal enforcement actions in greater Tucson, including raids, vehicle stops, and aerial surveillance, the AP said. Meyer and other organizers said the map also includes police facilities and immigration detention facilities, along with flight paths of various federal agencies’ surveillance flights. One example on the map is a December raid at one of several targeted Taco Giro locations, the report said, where U.S. House Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper sprayed by federal agents.
Incidents placed on the map are vetted and assigned to categories based on the level of evidence available, organizers said. Meyer said the map uses labels including “confirmed” and “credible but unconfirmed.” “If we have photographs of, say, an agent wearing a tactical vest that says ICE, that’s confirmed,” Meyer said. “Credible unconfirmed, we’re very confident something happened.” Meyer also said a credible observer’s testimony could be sufficient for the “credible unconfirmed” threshold even without photographs, saying, “Their testimony about that would be enough for us.”
Organizers said the project relies on hundreds of people, including non-citizens, who have contributed eyewitness accounts of immigration enforcement to the map and its underlying database. The AP report said the site includes information from local news as well as reports collected by Tucson Rapid Response and neighborhood networks such as Migra Watch, plus information shared on social media and in WhatsApp groups. Rapid Response member Steven Davis told the AP he has documented five incidents, including one in which he said he was pepper sprayed by law enforcement, and he said publishing those accounts supports efforts to show what ICE is doing.
“The value of the observation is that we take this out of the shadows and get it out into the public,” Davis said. Davis said he records incidents with care because he knows his data will be used for Migra Map. “There’s the saying garbage in, garbage out. I want to make sure that the information that I’m providing is the most accurate information that I can possibly provide,” Davis said.
Meyer said the team had reviewed around 562 incidents by late April, with about 300 meeting a threshold to be included, and that the goal is to review reported incidents within a week before adding qualifying cases. He also said, “We know that the map is an undercount by any estimation.” As for how the map is expected to be used, Meyer said he hopes it can become a platform for making information accessible to the public and help people see patterns by comparing incidents across locations and time. Meyer said the map can help identify trends and point to hotspots such as El Super grocery store on Tucson’s south side, which he said is frequently used by mostly Latino customers and has seen a high concentration of enforcement.
The Tucson Migra Map was not described as the first such effort. The AP report said an initiative called People over Papers used nationally to track immigration enforcement was shut down by its host site, Padlet, for violations of content policy. The report also said federal officials have warned that tracking puts officers at risk, and that other tracking sites, including ICEBlock, were previously taken offline after the Trump administration called for their removal.
Davis said the Migra Map differs from some earlier trackers by not attempting to alert people in real time to where enforcement is happening. “It doesn’t tell you where ICE is active right now. It tells you where ICE has been active in the last months,” Davis said. “You could file a Freedom of Information Act for the Tucson District Office and get the exact same information that we’re providing on the map.” Meyer said he and other developers have been public about the project, and he pointed to the Constitution’s protections for free speech as a reason the map might continue operating. “It’s not a crime to collect this information and share this information,” Meyer said.