As Arizona turns up the heat on illegal immigrants, civil rights groups are demanding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) release details about a rapidly expanding federal program that helps local police identify illegal immigrants for potential deportation. The Center for Constitutional Rights and two other groups filed a lawsuit on April 27 attempting to force ICE to turn over data about its “Secure Communities” program after failing to get the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“This program has very little public scrutiny. There’s very little known about the way it operates,” said Sunita ...
Revolving Door From Capitol Hill to Big Banks
Concerned about seeing their huge profits cut, six big banks are leading the charge to weaken or block new financial... View Article
Continue readingOnline Users Look For Government Information
A new survey out from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that Americans are going online to look... View Article
Continue readingExplore the House’s Expenditures
We've updated our House disbursement data to include a "bioguide ID" for each row pertaining to a legislator's office. For more information on why we did that, and how you can use it, read on.
Some of you may know that the House began posting its statements of disbursements online in November of last year. You can find them at disbursements.house.gov in PDF form. We at Sunlight parsed these PDFs and published the data ourselves in a structured format, for easy searchability.
It still hasn't been easy to link this dataset up to others.
Continue readingWyden, Grassley Introduce Bill to End Secret Holds
This is a nice piece of legislation from Sens. Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley: The Secret Holds Elimination Act would... View Article
Continue readingSummer of Code 2010 Participants
Google has announced the participants for this year's Google Summer of Code, and we're proud to have four excellent students out of a great overall batch of applications.
We'll be posting updates here over the course of the summer on how the projects progress. Even though our students don't wrap up their classes for another few weeks and so the real work won't begin until May we figured we'd go ahead and introduce our four new students and their projects to the community.
Continue readingVentilation shaft collapses near Sunlight Foundation offices
We’re big fans of real-time data and reporting. We’re also big fans of the 1800 Cafe, our go to place... View Article
Continue readingCommittee members grilling Goldman have recieved Wall Street giant’s money
Four of the 10 committee members on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that grilled Goldman Sachs today have received campaign contributions from the Wall Street Giant. The amounts and recipients are as follows:
• Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, is the leading recipient of money from Goldman Sachs. Employees, their family members, and the company's political action committee are his fourth largest career donor at more than $337,000. That figure includes donations to his Senate and presidential campaigns. There are no contributions recorded to McCain for the 2010 cycle.
• Sen. Susan Collins', R-Maine, campaign received almost $24,000 in 2010 ...
Senate Judiciary Committee to Ponder Court Transparency
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold an executive business meeting on Thursday to evaluate a trio of bills aimed at... View Article
Continue readingIllegal immigrant stats available, but yet to appear on Data.gov
According to Department of Homeland Security statistics, there were an estimated 460,000 unauthorized immigrants in Arizona in January 2009. That statistic, making Arizona the state with the seventh largest illegal immigrant population, was often cited last week, as Gov. Jan Brewer signed the nation’s toughest law on illegal immigration.
The number comes from “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States,” a report that the DHS releases each year, but sadly does not add to Data.gov. It takes a little digging to find it, but the most recent report for January 2009 (released in ...
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