ICE detention centers expanding in U.S.

Data: Record number of migrants being detained

By: Lauren Villagran
Ignacio calderon
and Jennifer Borresen
USA Today

..... President Donald Trump's second term has brought sweeping changes to mitigation enforcement. One of the top takeaways: Immigration and Costumes Enforcement detention has expanded dramatically, both in the number of people being held and the sites holding them.
..... Here are a few things to know about immigration detention today: [01/14/2026]

Record number of detainees

..... Trump kick-started his promised "mass deportation" campaign in 2025 with a series of executive orders that paved the way for a stricter application of immigration law and for new policies to expand enforcement.
..... A year in, immigrant arrests have climbed dramatically. The pace of deportation flights - while rising - hasn't quite kept up. The result is that more people are being held in detention for longer.
..... There were nearly 69,000 people held in ICE detention on January 7, 2026, according to snapshot data provided by ICE. that figure eclipses the number of people being detained a year earlier, which reached fewer than 38,000 people in early January 2025, before Trump took office.
..... Trump's orders for ICE to "maximize" detention and end discretionary releases of immigrants have driven the rise in the detained population, according to anew report by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy organization that promotes fairness in immigration policy. A separate order forcing immigration judges to deny broad to large swaths of immigrants means more are fighting their case to remain in the United States from inside detention.
..... "With the administration sending more people to detention centers, fewer people are being permitted to leave them while they fight their cases," According to the report.
..... The American Immigration Council report tracked a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal recored held in ICE detention on any given day.
..... Other researchers have underscored the trend.
..... "We've never seen detention numbers this high," said Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher at Syracuse University. "The growth in immigrant detention in the last four months has come almost exclusively from detaining people with no criminal history whatsoever."
..... In a departure form prior practice during both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Trump administration currently considers anyone who crossed the border illegally a criminal according to a June [2025] opinion from the Department of Justice. The opinion suggests any immigrant "who eludes examination is like a convict who escapes from federal custody."

More ICE detention centers

..... ICE holds immigrants in a variety of detention settings. They include privately run, dedicated immigration detention centers, temporary, tent facilities on military bases; county jails; and state prisons.
..... The number of ICE detention centers increased dramatically in 2025, driven by an increase in the number of county jails holding immigrants for ICE, but also in the arrival of alternative sites like Camp Est Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas; or the Florida-run "alligator Alcatraz" near Miami.
..... Most recently, the administration began contemplating buying and converting large warehouses into detention centers.
..... "Now they want something more industrialized, more mechanized," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a coauthor of the report. "a few massive, mega facilities where they can hold tens of thousands of people. Whether it will happen is unclear."
..... There were 107 detention center holding immigrants in early January 2025. By the end of the year, the number had roughly doubled to 212, according to ICE data.

Increase death counts

..... More people in immigration detention means more deaths in custody, too.
..... The agency has publicly reported 15 deaths from January 2025, though September 30, 2025, the end of the fiscal year. A congressional memo in November 2025 counted 25 deaths in ICE custody since the state of the calendar year, and The guardian news outlet, compiling from various sources, counted 32 deaths in 2025.
..... Issue with subpart care in immigration detention facilities are longstanding and predate the current Trump administration.
..... a 2024 ACLU report reviewed three years of in-custody deaths during the first Trump and Biden administration and found 95% of ICE detention deaths could have been prevented with adequate care. The report cited "flawed internal oversight mechanisms and failure to provide adequate medial and mental health car"in ICE custody settings.

ICE has more money

..... Congress authorized $45 billion in funding to expand ICE detention, on top of the agency's already approved $4 billion appropriation.
..... That breaks down to an annual budget of nearly $15 billion, two times larger than the annual budget for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to the American Immigration Council report.
..... The report calculates that with this additional funding, ICE could acquire enough detention beds to house 135,000 people at any given time. The United States hasn't held that many people outside the criminal justice system since the internment of people of Japaneses m German and Italian descent, during World War II.
..... Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Mitigation Studies, which advocates for mitigation restrictions, said ICE needed the additional funding to improve processing "to move people through the system" and stop releases form detention centers.
..... "They don't want to have to release people because there is no space for them," she said.

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