The Human Impact Project is a public, AI-augmented database that documents individual incidents of U.S. immigration enforcement by extracting structured data from news, court records, and other media. The project makes systemic enforcement patterns visible and searchable for legal advocates, researchers, and the public.

No comprehensive, structured record of immigration enforcement incidents exists at the individual incident level, making it difficult to identify patterns in who is targeted, where enforcement occurs, and under what circumstances. The Human Impact Project addresses this gap by combining automated source discovery with large language model-powered data extraction to build a continuously updated, geocoded database. The system processes source material from news APIs, litigation records, social media platforms, and direct submissions, then uses natural language processing to extract structured fields including date, location, incident type, affected person demographics, and enforcement setting. A multi-stage deduplication pipeline detects when multiple sources describe the same event, synthesizing them into unified incident records with source-attributed timelines. Articles covering multiple individuals are automatically split into distinct entries to preserve the specificity of each person’s experience.

The resulting database is publicly searchable by keyword, location, date range, geographic area, country of origin, and over forty descriptive tags spanning incident type, person-impacted categories, and enforcement setting. An interactive map visualization surfaces geographic concentration patterns. Sources are automatically archived to preserve access even if original publications are removed.

The Human Impact Project aims to make the human reality of enforcement policy legible at scale through the documentation of individual stories. By structuring enforcement activity at the individual level, the project surfaces patterns of misconduct, due process violations, and policy impacts that present opportunities for legal action and systemic accountability.