Tucson advocates have launched a community-built online map that documents federal immigration enforcement activity across the city, offering a public record of an enforcement surge that has seen detentions more than triple over the past year and a half. The project, called the Tucson Migra Map, draws on eyewitness reports, local news accounts, social media posts and spreadsheets maintained since January 2025 to map raids, vehicle stops, aerial surveillance and other actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. The map arrives as arrests escalate under President Donald Trump’s mass deportation initiative, which MSI previously reported has pushed immigration arrests past 100,000 in May.
The map was built by geographer Dugan Meyer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona and a volunteer with Tucson Rapid Response, along with other advocates. “This project came out of the documentation work that Rapid Response is doing, but also around the city,” Meyer said. “It is a community research project, community mapping project.” The database that feeds the map contains reports from hundreds of people, including non-citizens, who have shared their eyewitness accounts, according to the Migra Map website. Information is also drawn from local news, neighborhood networks like Migra Watch, and WhatsApp groups.
Incidents are vetted and classified as “confirmed” or “credible but unconfirmed” based on evidence. Photographic proof of an agent wearing an ICE vest qualifies an incident as confirmed, Meyer said, while an unphotographed event witnessed by a trained Rapid Response observer is filed as credible but unconfirmed. “Their testimony about that would be enough for us,” he said. As of late April, the team had reviewed roughly 562 incidents and included about 300 that met the threshold, with a goal of reviewing new reports within a week. “We know that the map is an undercount by any estimation,” Meyer said.
The map displays not only enforcement actions but also police facilities, immigration detention centers and the flight paths of federal surveillance aircraft. Repeated vehicle reports have helped confirm the accuracy of the data, Meyer said. Organizers say the tool reveals hotspots that align with residents’ experience: high concentrations of enforcement activity at the El Super grocery store on Tucson’s south side, which serves a largely Latino clientele, and at specific apartment complexes. “It’s used as a hunting ground for that, but there are others as well,” Meyer said of the grocery store.
Lucia Vindiola, an activist who launched the mutual aid group La Bodega to provide groceries and other assistance to families affected by the enforcement surge, said the map captures the disruption. “It indicates the level of chaos and how disruptive it is to our community,” Vindiola said. “We are seeing firsthand the impact on families, limiting them from shopping for groceries and supplies.”
The map’s database includes the December raid at a Taco Giro restaurant where U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper sprayed by federal agents — one of the higher-profile incidents documented by the project.
Rapid Response member Steven Davis has reported five incidents to the map, including one in which he, too, was pepper sprayed by law enforcement. Davis said making the activity visible is the whole point. “The value of the observation is that we take this out of the shadows and get it out into the public,” Davis said. “The Migra Map is a public facing map that makes visible this activity that is mostly behind the scenes.” Knowing his data feeds a public archive intensifies his commitment to accuracy, he added: “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.”
The Tucson Migra Map was not the first tool of its kind. A national tracker called People over Papers was shut down by its host site, Padlet, for content-policy violations, and another site, ICEBlock, was taken offline after the Trump administration called for its removal. Federal officials have said such tracking puts officers at risk. Meyer argued the map is different because it reports after the fact rather than in real time — and because the Constitution’s free-speech guarantee protects it. “It’s not a crime to collect this information and share this information,” he said.
Davis drew the same distinction. “It doesn’t tell you where ICE is active right now. It tells you where ICE has been active in the last months,” he 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 noted that he and other developers have been public about the project, though some contributors still opt to report anonymously out of fear. “I think that anyone paying attention is at the very least concerned” about the current administration, he said. He said he feels privileged to be able to associate publicly with the work.
Meyer acknowledged the tool’s limitations. “The important thing is that it doesn’t tell us a lot,” he said. “While many people would like it to be a real-time alert system, this map can’t be that.” He hopes it will become a durable public information platform and inspire similar efforts elsewhere.