Michigan Public used the Free Law Project’s CourtListener API to get access to docket information for civil lawsuits in Michigan’s Eastern and Western U.S. District Courts. We filtered for suits with a “nature” listed as “463 Prisoner: Habeas Corpus - Alien Detainee.”
We also used Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) to seek out and include additional cases missing from CourtListener. Only one additional case was found.
Michigan Public then used the GovInfo API to get access to PDFs of rulings in these cases. We also directly reviewed any cases that did not have a PDF from GovInfo.
Rulings were analyzed using Google Pinpoint’s structured data tool. This tool uses annotations on a set of example documents to search and extract similar pieces of information across a larger set of documents. Pinpoint identified the outcome of most rulings, as well as details like where petitioners were detained, circumstances surrounding their arrest and their nationality (as described by the judge.) Reporters manually verified the extracted information in every Eastern District case and 96 Western District cases.
