Immigrant Detention Update: New Lawsuit Challenges ICE Detention, Latest Numbers on Detained Migrants, Malaysia Criticized for Detaining Unaccompanied Children

Immigrant detention numbers in the United States have crept upward in recent weeks, but the real story is what detention means and how detention is used to advance immigration enforcement priorities both in the U.S. and around the world.

Before we get into the stories for today, I wanted to remind everyone that now that I’m approaching 200 published posts over the past two years, I’ve made some improvements to the navigation options. Each post is now categorized using a few keywords, and a few of the most common keywords now appear at the top of the homepage here. This gives the newsletter more of a “newspaper” feel with different themes and sections.

I also wanted to say “thank you” to the 100 or so people who signed up just this weekend. We are closing in on 2,500 readers and I would be thrilled if you could help me cross that threshold by recommending this to other people online.

ICE Holds Migrants in Detention Long After They Win Their Cases

A new lawsuit by Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights (CAIR) Coalition, the National Immigration Project (NIP), and the ACLU of Virginia challenge ICE’s practice of holding immigrants in detention and trying to deport them even after a judge has allowed them to stay in the United States. This can happen because some forms of protection from deportation that an immigration judge can grant still allow the government to deport that person to another country (so long as it isn’t the one where they would face persecution).

This almost never happens in practice, but when it does, it’s a bit mind-boggling. It’s hard enough to win a deportation case, but just imagine winning your case only to find out that you actually lost your case—and you have to wait in detention for months until the government sorts things out.

Read more about the lawsuit from the National Immigration Project here or in the Washington Post’s coverage online.

New ICE Detention Data Out

The latest data on the total number of people in detention show a moderate and sustained tick upward but otherwise don’t show any clear trends. Data released last week by ICE shows that the running average of the number of people in detention has increased in the past few weeks, but not by much. Currently, around 30,000 people are in detention. That’s up from the start of the Biden administration and from early 2022 when numbers were around 20,000, but it’s not a radical increase over the past 10 months or so and nowhere near the height of the Trump administration. See TRAC’s data on detention here.

Image available on ICE’s Flickr account here.

Malaysia Criticized for Detaining Migrant Children

Malaysia has been heavily criticized in recent months for its practice of detaining unaccompanied migrant children, including children under the age of eight. Stories like this really hit home with me because of how US-focused so much of our immigration reporting is and how often we forget that the abuse that migrants face does not exist just here at home, but exist around the world.

Malaysia is one of the largest migrant-receiving countries in Southeast Asia, with over 2 million documented migrant workers and about the same number of undocumented or irregular migrants according to the IOM.

Political and ethnic conflict in neighboring Myanmar is just one of the push factors sending migrants—including migrant children—toward Malaysia, resulting in a growing migrant detention system with at least seven detention centers in operation according to the Global Detention Project.

Read the first of a two-part series on migrant child detention in Malaysia from New Naratif: Explainer I: “Don’t Come Back, Soldiers Are Here”: Children in Malaysia’s Immigration Detention Centres.

For Further Reading

If you’re looking to read more about immigrant detention in the US and around the world, here are three books I highly recommend.

1. Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance by Kristina Shull. (Amazon link.)

2. Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System by Elliott Young. (Amazon link.)

3. Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández. (Amazon link.)

4. Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis by Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (editors). (Amazon link.)

5. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison by Behrouz Boochani. (Amazon link.)

And in case you missed it, I wrote a longer post last week on rural migrant detention centers, especially the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

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