The immigration enforcement debate in the United States has long been organized around a single, visible institution: detention. Whether the question is how many beds to fund, which facilities to expand, or whether detention itself is justifiable, the conversation almost always begins and ends with the people in custody. More recently, alternatives to detention (ankle monitors, smartphone tracking apps, case management programs) have entered the discourse as a possible middle ground, and for good reason: developing credible alternatives to mass detention is one of the most pressing challenges in immigration policy today.
But both of these frames, detention and its alternatives, obscure a far larger and more consequential reality: the non-detained docket, the approximately 7 million people living in communities across the United States while their immigration cases proceed through a system that has almost no framework for managing them. Most are not in detention. Most are not enrolled in any formal supervision program. They are living in a kind of legal and bureaucratic limbo, subject to a patchwork of bond conditions, reporting requirements, and individual officer discretion that has never been systematically studied, and for which there is not even a consensus about what effectiveness would look like, let alone evidence about how to achieve it.
In cartography, terra incognita referred to the vast regions of the map that remained uncharted: territories that were enormous in scale and consequence but that no one had yet explored or documented. The non-detained docket is immigration policy’s terra incognita. It is a population larger than the individual populations of 36 U.S. states, shaping enforcement outcomes every day, yet almost absent from the research literature, the policy conversation, and the public imagination. And unlike the blank spaces on old maps, this is not a gap that will fill itself. Understanding the non-detained docket, and building viable alternatives to mass detention, requires deliberate, rigorous investigation into territory that no one has charted.
What makes this gap in knowledge so consequential is that the non-detained docket is not a temporary condition or a policy failure waiting to be corrected. It is a permanent, structural feature of the immigration enforcement system. There will never be enough detention capacity to hold 7 million people; no administration, regardless of its politics, will detain its way to full compliance. At the same time, the practical challenges of managing a population of this scale do not disappear simply because mass, indiscriminate detention is undesirable—including the difficult question of what should happen when someone receives a final order of removal and does not leave.
The absence of rigorous research into these questions does not create a neutral space: it creates a vacuum filled by polarizing rhetoric and damaging policies. Without evidence, each new administration can reverse its predecessor’s approach wholesale, and every policy swing (from expansion to contraction and back again) damages the system’s capacity to function and erodes whatever institutional knowledge existed before. Politicization thrives in the absence of data. Evidence-based research is not just an academic exercise here. We believe it is the precondition for building durable alternatives to mass detention that can hold across administrations, grounded in principles of human dignity and respect for law rather than the ideological preferences of whoever holds power at the moment.
Join Claire Trickler-McNulty and me for a virtual conversation about what the non-detained docket is, how it relates to detention and alternatives to detention, and why understanding it is essential to any serious reckoning with immigration enforcement in the United States. We will explore what we actually know, and the significant amount we don’t, about how ICE manages millions of people outside of detention, why the current system operates without an evidence base, and what it would take to build enforcement policies that balance limited resources, human dignity, and the rule of law. We will also discuss our forthcoming research collaboration and how interested supporters can get involved.
This conversation is for anyone, regardless of political perspective, who wants to move past the noise and understand how the immigration enforcement system actually works, where its biggest gaps are, and what evidence-based policy could look like. Whether you work in policy, law, journalism, advocacy, or are simply trying to make sense of the immigration debate, this discussion will give you a framework you won’t find anywhere else.