Overview. At the nation’s more than 300 ports of entry, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers screen all foreign visitors, returning American citizens and imported cargo that enters the U.S. According to the agency, the OFO “is the largest component in CBP.” This component is not only responsible for border security at all ports of entry – by land, air and sea – but also is required to facilitate “the lawful trade and travel at U.S. ports of entry that is critical to our Nation’s economy.”[1] The data contained in this TRAC web query tool tracks all persons OFO determines are “inadmissible,” why they are deemed inadmissible, and how OFO officers decide to ultimately handle them. Information on the age, citizenship, gender, and whether they were stopped as part of a family group or as an unaccompanied child, is included. Locational information is also provided identifying which of over twenty OFO field offices was responsible for supervising this process. These details were compiled from case-by-case records obtained from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University through a long series of individual FOIA requests. The data are released in anonymous form. Coverage. The data cover all inadmissibles under Title 8. Expulsions under Title 42 which began March 20, 2020, under an order by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on public health grounds as a result of the COVID pandemic are not covered. TRAC is seeking access to Title 42 records as well so that they may be added to our coverage but these as yet have not been provided. What Is Counted: Counts are of each inadmissible entry event. These may overstate the number of individuals when the same individual attempts to reenter through the same or a different U.S. port of entry during a given period of time. TRAC has requested that case-by-case records of inadmissibles be organized in a way that allow identifying those involving the same individual, but this information has yet to be provided. In the records TRAC received, we discovered that port authorities also sometimes only appear to create a single record when at times the data indicated covered more than one individual. Records representing multiple individuals generally recorded the characteristics of a single individual and then was used to apply to that group. Unless there was an explicit indicator indicating that a record applied to a group of individuals, counts represent the number of individual records CBP released to TRAC. For more recent data covering FY 2021 onward, a separate field was included in the release indicating the number of individuals the record represented. Published CBP statistics[2] appear to have used these count indicators to sum up the agency’s published counts of inadmissibles. TRAC accordingly followed the same procedure in compiling its statistics.2 Most of the time the records corresponding to multiple individuals appeared to relate to the handling of “crews,” including work crews at ports of entry who were not allowed to enter the U.S. but are included as part of OFO’s inadmissible counts. But occasionally these were young children where only a single age and gender was recorded for multiple individuals. Using the Data Tool: Dimensions and DefinitionsFiltering the data using the three data tables. Select a different factor or dimension to display in each of the three tables. The tables are inter-connected so that the data filter from left to right. After selecting a factor to display in the left most table, select a particular row category to drill in on by clicking on that row's label in the left-most table. The middle table will then display the details for that particular selection from the left table on the dimension you had chosen to display for the middle table. In other words, if you click on a category in the left table it displays only cases within that class in the middle table. Click on a category in the middle table to display only cases within that selection in the right table. To help you keep track, your selection is displayed at the top of the table to the right. Sorting the tabular data displayed. By clicking on the column headings in a table, you can sort the tabular data displayed. Clicking on the table column heading for the name of the dimension, sorts each tabular row in alphabetical order. Clicking a second time, sorts in reverse alphabetical order. Clicking on the column heading "Total" reverses the default sort order of largest to smallest to display from the smallest to the largest value. Selecting what is displayed in the time series graph. The data in the graph updates to reflect the category in the table you selected when clicking on its row label. The title shown above the graph indicates the selection criteria you have chosen. Mouse-over any bar in the graph to view the value being plotted. There are also two additional controls you can use to change what the graph displays.
Data dimensions. To change the set of categories displayed in a table, select a different factor or dimension from the pull-down menu above each table. The following factors can be selected:
Additional TRAC Immigration Enforcement Data and ToolsTo access additional data using other TRAC immigration enforcement tools, go to this directory of data tools. Footnotes [1] See https://www.cbp.gov/about/leadership-organization/executive-assistant-commissioners-offices. [2] Available data indicated about nine out of ten records involved a single individual. Although occasionally a single record represented as many as 8 individuals, over three out of four counts over one were of just two individuals. Summing the counts resulted in inadmissible counts that were roughly ten percent higher than the simple count of the number of case-by-case records. |