Activism / Student Nation / February 13, 2026
With ICE Map, Rice University students Jack Vu and Abby Manuel hope to help communities understand where immigration enforcement activities are happening and how they are happening in real time.
Left: Rice University students Jack Vu and Abby Manuel. Right: A screenshot of ICE Map.
(Jack Vu and Abby Manuel) Since President Trump’s second inauguration last year, federal immigration enforcement by ICE agents has expanded significantly. Agents were deployed in major cities with radical repression. Controversial and violent methods of targeting and detention have been deployed and have drawn widespread scrutiny and protests, particularly since the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Amid this escalating tension, two Rice University freshmen, Jack Vu and Abby Manuel, developed an online platform called ICE Cardwhich tracks local reporting on ICE enforcement actions and consolidates verified incidents. The project aims to help users better understand where immigration control activities are taking place and how they are happening in real time.
Vu and Manuel’s map has attracted greater attention in recent months, thanks in part to prominent activists such as Greta Thunberg, who shared the project on Instagram. The students also presented their work at the New(s) Knowledge Symposium 2025 at MIT.
I spoke with Vu and Manuel about how they developed this project, the kind of reception they’ve received, and where they see themselves going from here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
—Arman Amin
Arman Amin: What inspired you to develop this project?
Jack Wu: We are both from Houston. I conducted this volunteer project with immigrants at an apartment complex in East Houston. We went there every week and played games, read books, played hopscotch, and taught them American football. In April 2025, they stopped coming on a Saturday and we were like, “What’s going on?”
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A person in the program goes to knock on doors and a resident says ICE arrived last weekend, so none of them are leaving their house. They don’t even go to school. So the program stopped because the children could no longer come. It was quite infuriating.
Abby Manuel: Jack and I were in the same computer science class in high school, so we worked together on many different projects. He consulted me about what was happening with his program.
I think we were both really affected by the problem. Growing up in the Houston community, immigration is a very prevalent thing. We have a huge Spanish-speaking community. At our school, we started hosting immigration enforcement forums. It has become very relevant in everyday life, especially in Houston.
So we started working on the project right out of high school because we had a lot of free time. We started working a few days a week, and then the project grew into something much larger. We just decided to spend whole days coding in coffee shops and became really passionate about it. We launched it probably only two weeks after we started working on it.
But we continued to work on it to build our database. One of the biggest challenges early on was just acquiring sources, because we really wanted to emphasize local voices rather than just, “What is the government saying about ICE? What are the national headlines saying about ICE? What are just the big statistics?” We wanted to capture what was happening on a more community level.
We came across this tool called Media Cloud that helped us bring together all these local newspapers through a query-based tool. And once we figured that out, we were able to continue to expand the site and build it out over the summer.
AA: Can you explain what the ICE card does and how it works?
Joint venture: It is a news aggregation platform. We pull thousands and thousands of articles from all over the country and we throw them all into this big pipeline where we evaluate whether they’re relevant to ICE activity. For example, does it really speak to our intended goal, and then, does it contain location information that would allow us to map it? Based on the results of our pipeline, we’re able to insert it so people can look around, look at their area, Minneapolis, Houston, Los Angeles, and see relevant news stories about ICE activity.
The advantage of news is that it is already verified. Some cards take an approach of collecting “user reports”. What we found difficult about that process was that you had to sort of manually verify all of these different reports, and people were making false reports. But all these local news sources have already done all this work. We can take this opportunity to broadcast their work on a bigger stage.
AM: We also use headlines from national newspapers. We even include sources from ICE press releases. We’re just trying to give people an overview of what’s going on, because we think information and transparency are the most important things.
AA: What was the process of creating this tool like, from start to finish?
Joint venture: We always knew it would be somewhat of a data problem. You know, showing things on a map isn’t very difficult. There are some really good tools to help you do this, created by a lot of really smart people. But we would spend hours on our laptops, trying to find good, consistent sources that consistently reported ICE activity in a verified way, and that’s what led us to Media Cloud, to nonprofits, things like that. Most of the app gets good information.
AM: And then, once we have that information, it’s just a matter of filtering out what’s actually relevant, what’s related to ICE in terms of immigration, not just “ice” in terms of winter storms and freezing temperatures. Get rid of all those false positives. Also determining the location and making sure we are accurately representing the data is another challenge.
AA: How has the map been used so far? Are you able to track how many people are accessing or interacting with your card?
Joint venture: Today we have around 100,000 users nationwide. We see a wide location. Washington, D.C., is number one, followed by Cleveland and Houston.
AM: As far as how people use the site, I think it’s really just an information tool to help you better understand what’s going on in your community. Our site doesn’t actually help people track ICE agents in their area. It’s just about helping to inform people. So I think most of our users are just looking for information about what’s happening in their area.
AA: How has the project been received since its launch?
AM: When our site first launched, we were trying to promote it on our Instagram pages and some Reddit threads. When you put something out on the internet, you obviously get mixed reviews. We definitely received some pushback. And ICE is a very hot topic.
There was a bit of a negative reaction at first, but I would say overwhelmingly positive, especially from people in our community, our friends, our families and our other students in our area. Many people in Houston actually saw this tool as a benefit rather than a drawback, and recently we’ve received even more positive feedback. The site’s traffic kind of stagnated for a little bit after it launched, and then recently it’s really picked up. We’ve had a lot of recent activity within ICE, so I think the topic is becoming even more urgent. People really continue to look for resources.
Last week, Greta Thunberg published our site on her Instagram. So we started getting a lot more traction. And then Rice University published a paper on our project. All of this increased media coverage has brought more attention to the site, and I think the response to all of this in our community has been really positive. And all across the country, people are learning what’s happening and just hoping they can take some of the fear and the unknown away. People come up to us and congratulate us on projects and thank us for the work. So our community really appreciated this tool.
AA: How has this increased attention and visibility shaped the project?
AM: It’s amazing to have more focus on work. That was our intention from the start with the project. We created it so that it could help people, so that it could reach as many people as possible and just raise awareness. We were invited by the organization we collaborated with, Media Cloud, to present our work at an MIT symposium in October.
That was probably one of the biggest opportunities we had: just getting eyeballs and/or comments on our site. Many of them gave us feedback on our project that we were able to incorporate, and we made some really meaningful connections. In presenting it to them, it was the first time I felt like we realized that, “Okay, this tool is really, really meaningful.” »
AA: In recent weeks, national discussions about ICE have become even more heated following the high-profile crackdown and protests in Minnesota, including the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents. How did this national moment shape the way people responded to your ICE Map project, and did it influence the way you viewed your own role or responsibility at that time?
Joint venture: What is happening in Minneapolis is very telling because it is so egregious. With Alex Pretti and Renee Goode, everyone can watch the videos and see for themselves what’s going on. But at the same time, if they follow specific news sites, they will see opinions that completely do not correspond to what the video shows.
The goal of ICE Map was always to give people this information to show them exactly what ICE was doing, because we thought it was very detrimental to them, right? What hurts ICE the most is that people know the exact truth about what they are doing. I think Minneapolis makes it very obvious. The goal was always to attract attention ion on the site. It was always to show people, “Here’s what they’re doing in Houston. Here’s what they’re doing in Los Angeles and Chicago and New York. Here’s the truth: They’re wearing masks and they’re running around and beating people up.”
AA: How do you see the project evolving in the future?
AM: As we mentioned, the most important factor of our site is actually simply the information, the sources. So anything we can do to just create our sources and get as much information as possible is really the goal. We just need to continue to gather what’s out there and display it as accurately as possible and make sure we’re filtering to the best of our ability.
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AA: Looking ahead, what do you hope to pursue after graduation? Did the work on this project shape these goals?
Joint venture: ICE Map is almost like a start-up. You build your product, then you try to get people to look at it, maybe care a little bit about it. I look forward to doing this in the future.
AM: I have always been very interested in the intersection between law, technology and economics. I study economics and computer science at Rice. I hope to take advantage of the intersection of these fields and perhaps pursue something in the law field after I graduate, perhaps go to law school. I hope I can put it all together. ICE Map is in some way a representation of these skills. It captures aspects of law and public policy as well as technology and computing. This has been a great product for me that has allowed me to explore those interests, in addition to just doing something impactful for my community, which is always a priority.
AA: There were reports that Meta blocked access to the ICE list, a database of Department of Homeland Security employees. How do you see your project being different and have you had any concerns about censorship or platform restrictions?
Joint venture: This worries us, but we are convinced that what we are doing is very good. We don’t intend to say to everyone, “This guy is an ICE officer, this guy is an ICE officer.” What we do is highlight publicly available information. and it has an impact. It’s not about going out and physically standing in front of ICE agents and stopping them from doing what they’re doing, but rather letting public opinion change.
AM: Ultimately, we’re just providing information that’s already available and making it easy for people to find, because it’s not easy to understand what’s going on in your community, even if sources exist. We are not creating any new information. We do not track ICE. Regardless of your position on immigration, there really is no legal ambiguity. I think everyone should agree that the public needs to understand what’s going on with the government, what’s going on in their lives, and what’s going on in their community.
Arman Amin Arman Amin is a Puffin 2025 writing student and focuses on politics and youth for The nation. He is a student at Vanderbilt University.
