*3.2. Data Collection*

To collect data from the ACLU, we searched all press releases and blog posts in 2020 that the ACLU released under the topic "Immigrants' Rights and Detention." This search returned 32 press releases and 23 blog posts. Most of these—28 and 13, respectively— covered COVID-19 in immigration detention, primarily pertaining to the increased risks of the virus among migrants in lockup. The majority of those that did not discuss the pandemic (eight of 14) were published prior to 12 March 2020,<sup>5</sup> in the weeks before the pandemic became widespread in the U.S., and the remaining six covered topics ranging from abortion access to unlawful detainment of migrants. We searched the websites of CoreCivic and GEO Group to gather their press releases. We also searched Wayback Machine and GlobeNewswire after discovering that the companies do not include all of their past press releases on their websites. Altogether, these searches returned 38 CoreCivic press releases and 16 GEO Group press releases from 2020, of which 22 and four, respectively, mentioned the pandemic in some capacity. Eleven of the remaining 28 were released prior to 12 March 2020, and the other 17 discussed such topics as financial reports, new policies and programs (such as reentry-focused legislation), and facility contract information. To collect data from ICE, we examined 631 news releases from 2020. In the heading of each news release, ICE included a label that identified the topic of the news release, such as "Enforcement and Removal," "Narcotics," and "Operational." Of its 631 news releases, 170 were released prior to 12 March and of the remaining 461, ICE labeled 49 of these "COVID-19."
