
Reveal sued the Office of Refugee Resettlement to obtain data on more than 265,000 children who had entered its custody since 2014.
Contributions
I analyzed the data in collaboration with Aura Bogado and found that although children are only supposed to be in shelters for a few days or weeks, thousands had spent three months or more. As noted in the description above, we also found that nearly 1,000 children had spent more than a year in custody, and at least three had been held for more than five years.
In addition to the analysis, I designed a column chart depicting the proportion of children whose stays were 100 days or longer, by the month they entered custody, as I’d found a nontrivial increase in that proportion following the implementation of the Trump administration’s separation policy in 2018.
I designed a dot plot visualization expounding what happened to the children who were in custody for a year or more by programmatically generating prose from the data.