Immigration Arrests and Detention Numbers Decline Slightly, but Court Rulings and Flood of Funding Likely to Change All That
ICE's detained population declined to 59,000 and arrests are down from June, but the Supreme Court's authorization of racial profiling and $165B in funding will likely chance all that.
According to the latest detention data released on Thursday, ICE is currently officially holding 58,766 people in one of 187 facilities across the country, as well as many potentially more in unmarked facilities and holding rooms. This number represents a decline from two weeks prior, when the agency reported a record high detained population of 61,226 people.
Watch DetentionReports.com for more updates soon about individual facility data.
ICE’s arrests have declined since June, from over 31,000 to a little less than 29,000 in August. Based on current data, I project around 25,500 arrests for September—but this simple statistical projection is unlikely to reflect reality. David Bier argued that the recent decline was influenced by a court order that limited ICE arrests in Southern California. That court order was recently overruled, however, and news sources are already reporting an increase in arrests and sweeps across Southern California. Moreover, as the new fiscal year begins in less than a month, ICE will be awash in billions of dollars in funding that will also likely contribute to more arrests. Note that I am inferring arrests using ICE’s reported data on ICE book-ins, which, as I showed recently using the Deportation Data Project’s data, does reliably approximate ICE arrests.
ICE Detention: Criminal History
Among people arrested by ICE, the composition by criminal history remains more or less the same, with about 1/3 in each category of having criminal convictions, criminal charges, and no criminal history. We don’t know what the criminal charges and convictions are, so we can’t assume that they represent particularly egregious crimes; nor can we assume that someone without a criminal charge/conviction in the US doesn’t have a charge/conviction in another country.
Here’s the updated table that goes with the graph above.
I've primarily focused on people detained through ICE enforcement rather than CBP enforcement, for reasons I explained in my earlier post this year. However, I want to present the complete breakdown by criminal history for everyone currently detained by both agencies combined. When we include CBP numbers in the total, people without criminal history still represent 45% of the detained population.
GPS Ankle Shackles Continue to Grow
The composition of the alternatives to detention population is shifting—not in total numbers, but in the type of technology ICE deploys. The Trump administration is prioritizing GPS ankle monitors over SmartLINK and other monitoring technologies. This shift appears driven by a preference for more punitive forms of surveillance rather than evidence that ankle monitors are more effective at ensuring court attendance or ICE check-ins.
The chart below shows GPS ankle monitor usage since 2020 to provide full context for our current situation. ICE has never exceeded 35,000 people on ankle monitors simultaneously, but we may be approaching that threshold. There are currently 28,070 people wearing ankle monitors.
Please use these graphs and the underlying data in any way that is helpful to you. You don’t need to ask permission, just please provide attribution and a link back to this post.
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