US Immigrant Detention System Entering a Period of Unprecedented Growth – 58,000 People Now Held in Over 200 Facilities

Latest data shows that one-third of people in detention have no criminal history, a 15x growth since January, while ICE's military-style tactics are criticized as unnecessarily aggressive.

According to the latest data published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) early this morning, the number of immigrants held in detention on June 29 reached 57,861 — up from 56,397 two weeks prior. ICE detention has now crossed the highest recent threshold of 55,654 set by the first Trump administration in 2019.

With the passage of the spending bill on July 4, which allocates $170 billion for immigration and $45 billion for ICE alone, we are undoubtedly entering a new period of unprecedented immigrant detention numbers that will only continue to set new records every two weeks going forward.

This is not as high as the 59,000 total that CBS reported on June 24. But CBS has not published the data it received from the Trump administration or explained the methodology behind those data, so we have no way of validating those reports. It is possible that daily fluctuations in the nationwide detained population account for the differences between ICE’s official data published on June 29 and the data CBS viewed; it may also be due to different approaches to counting who is in detention and where. Regardless of the reason, the differences highlight the importance of relying on official data that can be verified rather than on data shown to reporters under conditions of anonymity and unverifiability.

The biggest growth in recent weeks has been the number of people in civil detention with nothing more than civil immigration violations on their records. The chart and table below focus only on people in detention as a result of ICE arrests. This number increased from 7,781 on June 1 to 13,318 by the end of the month. The increases for people with pending criminal charges or criminal convictions inched upward.

These data and previous reporting raise important questions about whether ICE’s increasingly aggressive, SWAT-style tactics to arrest civil violators are justified.

One-third of all people held in ICE detention now have no criminal charges or convictions, up from just six percent in January. The percentage of immigrants held with criminal convictions has actually decreased from 62 percent to 36 percent. See the previous post in January for my prediction that this would take place and a detailed description explaining why.

To put the growth of detained people with no criminal histories in context, we can compare the current totals with the totals at the start of the Trump administration to visualize their relative growth over the past six months. There has been nearly a 16-fold growth in the number of people detained at any one time without criminal histories.

The fact that most ICE detainees were arrested by ICE, not CBP, points to a broader trend: immigration enforcement is now focused more on the interior than the border.

Stay tuned for updates about new Interval ADP numbers for each of ICE’s 201 detention facilities across the country and more discussions of the recent arrest data published by the Deportation Data Project.

One more thing… I often host live discussions of my posts on Substack Live, with background information and behind-the-scenes observations that don’t make it into the post. If you are interested in joining, download the Substack app and you’ll get an alert when I schedule a new live event.

Learn More About the Big Business of Immigrant Detention

If you want to learn more about the controversial world of private immigration detention, listen to my conversation with Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon about their new book: Immigration Detention, Inc.

Support public scholarship.

This newsletter is only possible because of your support. If you believe in keeping this work un-paywalled and freely open to the public, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can read more about the mission of this newsletter, why I finally decided to offer a paid option, and the impact of this work in 2025 so far.