We sued the Trump administration for these immigration records

Donald Trump entered his second term promising “mass deportations”. He also promised he’d target the “worst of the worst”. The Guardian wanted to know who, exactly, would be pulled into this deportation dragnet.

That question led us to “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms, also known as I-213 forms. Immigration agents fill out these forms each time they make an arrest, alleging that the person is in the country without authorization. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) then uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally.

The Guardian filed a series of records requests seeking I-213 forms from the Trump administration. When the government didn’t respond, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a non profit organization providing legal services to journalists, filed a lawsuit on the Guardian’s behalf. Months later, through this litigation, the Guardian received a series of spreadsheets with data extracted from I-213 forms covering fiscal year 2023 through August 2025.

The Guardian is releasing all of the documents that we have received through our lawsuit so far. The spreadsheets contain biographical details about each person, including criminal history and the number and nationalities of their children under the age of 18. This data has been minimally processed to remove potentially identifiable information.

These documents proved crucial in our reporting on who the administration is arresting and deporting. The Guardian used I-213 data to investigate the government’s claims about immigrants and their criminal convictions and the impact of the mass deportation campaign on families.

We hope this data will be equally valuable to fellow reporters at local and national newsrooms, and to researchers and advocates.

In order to report on the impact of family separation, we matched 86% of the I-213 records with a unique record in the data released by the Deportation Data Project, a team of academics and lawyers at the University of California, Berkeley tracking immigration enforcement using government data.