ICE and EOIR Data Cut Off During Government Shut Down Just as ‘Mass Detention’ Gets $45B Boost

ICE hasn’t produced crucial detention data in over 45 days despite continuing its aggressive—and sometimes illegal—enforcement rampage during the partial government shutdown.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation program is the most aggressive in modern history, driving up numbers of arrests, detentions, and deportations while also generating considerable public blowback due to the over-the-top cruel treatment of immigrants and citizens.

Administrative data on immigration enforcement is an essential source of objective public understanding on this controversial topic, unfiltered through political rhetoric and online hyperbole. The most reliable sources of data these days include ICE’s biweekly detention spreadsheet and the immigration court’s (EOIR) monthly docket database.

My public scholarship, as well as projects such as DeportationReports.com, rely on these data sources to make immigration enforcement more understandable and accessible, as well as provide reporters with numbers and context they can use in their reporting. Without new data, the public does not have information about how many people are in detention or how many people are being ordered deported by immigration judges.

But due to the government shutdown—now the longest in history—these data sources are no longer being produced at all. ICE’s most recent public detention data was current on September 21, 2025—45 long days ago. Our understanding of the scale of ICE’s detention system is a month and a half out of date. Under normal circumstances (if those really exist, which they don’t in immigration), this would be relatively unconcerning. But as I’ve noted frequently, the detention system is growing and evolving so quickly that 45 days can make a huge difference.

The absence of data comes at a concerning time. ICE just received a windfall of $45 billion for expanding immigrant detention over the next three years, “turbocharging what already stood as the world’s largest immigrant detention system,” according to Muzaffar Chishti and Valerie Lacarte at Migration Policy Institute.

I want to add an important caveat about the timing of the current delay. It is not unusual to see a delay in ICE’s detention data around the end of the fiscal year when the agency focuses its resources on producing year-end reports. But when we multiply the predictable year-end delay by the unpredictable government shutdown-induced delay, it means that we have to wait longer—perhaps much longer—than usual to get the facts out of the agency.

The graph below emphasizes the delays in ICE’s detention data at the end of each fiscal year. Since we are already experiencing a 45-day delay with no end to the shutdown in sight, it is very likely that, under the Trump administration, we are going to see the longest delay in detention data since Congress began requiring this data in 2018.

The detention data isn’t the only data that’s gone missing. No EOIR data was produced for September, and it is highly unlikely that October data will be produced either, given that they should be posting it right about now. Even if the shutdown were to end today, it is unclear how long it would take the agencies to start producing this data again. (During the last shutdown, the immigration courts were closed, but this time the courts have remained open.)

Based on precedent, when the agencies do start producing the data again, they probably won’t backfill with data they should have published, so from a research perspective, we’ll have to live with a data gap in this period that won’t get filled in unless and until more detailed data is provided, such as that published by the Deportation Data Project. That gap matters less for the immigration court data, because that dataset includes more comprehensive historical records, while the detention data only includes single-point-in-time “snapshot” data.

I do not think that the lack of data merits panic. When we combine the factors of the government shutdown and the end of the fiscal year, I believe we have a clear explanation for why the data is not coming out of the agencies right now. If this were happening in June with no shutdown, I would be gravely concerned. On the other hand, I also believe that if ICE views arresting non-criminals, pregnant women, and children as “essential services” during a shutdown, at the very least, they should also be producing data that shows what they are doing.