A new online project backed by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's administration is documenting hundreds of people it says were detained, deported, separated from their families or otherwise harmed by the Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts, creating what organizers describe as a public record of President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign. The new site, called Disappeared in America, is backed by Pritzker's Illinois Accountability Commission and documents roughly 500 stories of immigrants and American citizens who say they were impacted by current U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, including during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago.
The launch comes amid an escalating political battle over immigration enforcement, with the White House touting arrests of alleged gang members, murder suspects and other criminal offenders, while critics argue large-scale operations have swept up many immigrants with no criminal record and led to multiple civil liberties violations. "Our end goal with this is honestly, our end goal with this is that this can never happen again. So that's where we're leading up to.
Our road is to lead to never again," Beatriz Lopez, co-founder and executive director of the Democracy Power Project, told Newsweek ahead of the site's launch. "What the, what the governor's office and the governor himself has done is really build a roadmap of how accountability can work, how we can showcase the stories, the people's voices, and really bring the perpetrators to account," she added. "There's obviously more that can be done, but a state can only do so much, and what the governor's office has done is really push, as far as he can to lift up the stories, to hold this administration accountable, and really be a model for other states going through very similar situations." In a statement to Newsweek, Pritzker said the Trump administration had launched "an unprecedented military-style assault against our communities, sending thousands of masked federal agents to harass, intimidate, and abuse our people," last year.
"Administration officials allowed agents to act unconscionably and told them their actions would be immune from investigation or accountability—they are not," Pritzker said. "There will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law, and Illinois will support the pursuit of justice to its fullest extent.” The new site is an interactive database of nearly 500 documented cases, including those of Lorenza Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, who were shot dead by ICE agents in Texas and Maine, respectively, in July, as well as Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. Other stories from detention and deportation proceedings are also laid out, with each person having a profile, some containing photos, video and audio recordings linked to their cases.
Lopez told Newsweek about one story, which had been turned into an animated video to illustrate what had happened to a girl named Ophelia. "It is about this young girl and she tells the story of how her father was arrested, and it's really a very sad story, but also one that sort of reflects the story of many daughters and sons who are seeing what is happening to their parents," Lopez said. "In this case, this young girl has cancer, and so she's going through this and she's seen what happened to her dad." While 500 stories are documented so far, over 605,000 people are said to have been deported under the second Trump administration, while 400,000 have been detained by ICE and 33 people have been killed, the site says.
The advocates behind the site, with Democracy Power Project, say that enforcement actions are often reduced to numbers in government announcements and that news stories about specific cases often fade. The goal, organizers say, is to create a public historical record, which others can add to over time. The Illinois Accountability Commission (IAC) was created by the state's Democratic governor in October 2025, amid Operation Midway Blitz, which was ICE's sweeping enforcement activity in Chicago and the surrounding area.
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