Since Trump took office on January 20, 2025, ICE has deported more than 66,000 people identified as members of a family unit, and the administration has restarted the long-term family detention that the Biden administration had ended. After yesterday’s post about the total number of book-ins to ICE detention reaching over 600,000 this month since the start of the Trump administration, I thought I should follow it up with a post about family detention and deportation, too.
In the first months of 2025, ICE reopened family detention at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley and at the Karnes County facility, both in Texas. CoreCivic, which runs the Dilley facility, says its five-year contract there will generate roughly $180 million a year, and the Karnes facility is operated by GEO Group. The reopenings reversed a decision the Biden administration made in December 2021 to end long-term family detention and replace it with electronic monitoring and case management. The Dilley facility had closed entirely in June 2024. I explained what family detention is, how we got here, and why it is so contested in an earlier post, Family detention: what you need to know, and I documented the rapid growth at Dilley this past winter in Family Detention at Dilley Triples in Size.
After family detention re-opened, the numbers of people held there increased in 2025, priced in early 2026, but have since declined substantially at Dilley and somewhat at Karnes. The decline is surprising since ICE has been arresting more people than ever this month. Detention Reports, the ICE facility hub built by Relevant Research, tracks each facility’s population using Interval ADP, the average number of people held during each reporting interval. As of the July 9, 2026 data, Dilley averaged about 161 people and Karnes about 914. Those are facility totals that count everyone held at each site, and Karnes in particular holds mostly single adults, so its number is not a count of detained families. The facility-level trend at each site is shown in Detention Reports’ own charts below. (As I explain below, the older higher numbers of people detained is not directly comparable to the current detained population.)
Despite some reduction in the population of detained families, ICE continues to deport large numbers of families. Counting from January 20, 2025 through the July 11, 2026 release, ICE recorded more than 66,000 removals of people identified as family-unit members, and at the current pace that figure passes 68,000 by the end of July. Family-unit removals have run at roughly 10 to 11 percent of all removals under this administration. In the release covering early August 2025, the family share climbed above 20 percent, more than 4,000 family-unit removals in a single two-week reporting period. The share has held fairly steady, but because total removals have surged, the absolute number of family members deported has grown with it. If the current pace holds, family-unit removals will reach roughly 185,000 by the end of the term in January 2029.
As the data show below, in fact, family units made up a higher percentage of deportations during the Biden administration—but the composition of who is being deported and why, as well as the total numbers of deportations, is really quite different. I would urge caution against any simplistic comparisons here.
A note on the terms, because ICE uses several and they do not all mean the same thing. These definitions come from the footnotes tab of ICE’s detention statistics spreadsheet. A family unit, which ICE abbreviates FAMU, is measured for each individual whose case family status is intact or intact-reunified, meaning that person was identified as a family member by CBP or ICE. It counts individual people, not families. Each adult and each child in a unit is counted separately, so one family of four traveling together contributes four to the 66,000 total. ICE also states that being identified as a family-unit member does not mean the whole family was removed together or at the same time. The removal totals themselves include removals, returns, and expulsions, which is how ICE defines its removals data. The two family facilities, Dilley and Karnes, are what ICE calls Family Residential Centers, written FRC in the footnotes and FSC in the data tables, and ICE says it resumed their use on April 7, 2025, after discontinuing them on March 31, 2022.
The facility charts come with a caveat that changes how they should be read. The same buildings have held very different populations over time. Dilley opened as a family detention center in 2014, held families through the Obama years, was converted to short-term processing under Biden, and then closed. Karnes held single adults for much of that period. Their populations before 2025 were largely not family detention in the current sense, so the pre-2025 portion of each facility’s chart should not be read as a record of family detention even though it was at the same facility that was previously (and now again) designed for family units. ICE’s own footnotes date the return of family detention to April 7, 2025, which is the point to read from on each chart.
ICE publishes the removal totals and the family-unit subset in the same biweekly spreadsheets it has released for years, and Detention Reports publishes the facility-level population with a documented method and stable links. The family detention centers are open again under multi-year contracts, and the deportation of family members is running in the tens of thousands and on pace to reach six figures before the term is out.
This is such useful information, thank you!
Does your research reflect legal family residents being forced to leave with the illegal family member?
As I understand, when an illegal family member is being deported, he or she is allowed to take his or her minor children and spouse with them if the spouses want to do so. If so, then being deported as a family unit is their choice.