Welcome to the weekly segment called This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers. I’ll highlight some of the main takeaways from the week’s news that you might have missed, but do it in a unique way. Rather than try to summarize everything, I’ll pick a handful of figures each week that best capture where things are moving, explain why they matter, and provide a source where you can learn more. If you have a number to add to the mix or have a question about any of the numbers here, let me know in the comments.
99.97%
The share of every refugee the United States admitted in fiscal year 2026 through July 31 who came from South Africa, 10,255 people out of 10,258.The Trump administration abolished the refugee system, then reopened it for just one group: white South Africans. The fiscal year opened with a ceiling of 7,500, the lowest in the program’s history, and an emergency presidential determination signed on May 21 raised it to 17,500 and allocated every one of the additional 10,000 places to Afrikaners from South Africa under Executive Order 14204. Total admissions were 38,102 in fiscal 2025 and 100,034 in fiscal 2024, so this is a program running at about a tenth of its size two years ago and drawing entirely from one country. Just three people came from a country other than South Africa.
Dayak, S. (2026, August 17). Refugee admissions to the U.S. are dropping sharply in Trump’s second term. Pew Research Center.
The White House. (2026, May 27). Emergency Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2026. Federal Register.
$9,975,502.40
The one-year contract signed this month to keep the power, security and fire-detection systems running at a Maryland warehouse a federal judge has barred ICE from converting into a detention center.ICE is good at one thing: wasting taxpayer money. The contract in question went to Teya Diversified Solutions on September 4 and runs through September 3, 2027, covering a vacant building outside Williamsport that was to become a 1,500-bed facility. Judge Brendan Hurson granted a preliminary injunction on April 15 halting the conversion, finding the project likely required an environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act that the department had skipped. Spending on the site already stands at $225.4 million, and the contracts in place let that reach $753.4 million without any new bidding.
Wriston, M. (2026, September 8). ICE Pays Nearly $10 Million to Maintain a Warehouse It’s Legally Barred From Using. Project Salt Box.
$1.26B
The retail and restaurant spending Cook County lost in the first year of intensified immigration enforcement.ICE’s out-of-control enforcement has real economic consequences. Researchers measured weekly origin-destination foot traffic across the county and found that trips between communities dropped after January 2025, with retail visits falling about 9 percent and restaurant visits about 10 percent. Converting the missing trips into spending produces $1.26 billion in foregone retail and restaurant activity over that first year, along with roughly $107 million in foregone local sales-tax revenue. Mass deportation isn’t just about immigration enforcement; it’s economic warfare against American communities.Wilson, M. D., Lester, T. W., & Acosta-Córdova, J. M. (2026, September 8). Hunkering Down: The Hidden Economic Cost of Federal Immigration Enforcement in Cook County, IL. Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois Chicago.
436%
The rise in ICE arrests of Asian immigrants nationwide since January 20, 2025, measured against the same period under the previous administration.Asian immigrants are often overlooked in the public conversation about detention and deportation. Stop AAPI Hate launched a tracker this week covering 35 Asian and Pacific Islander countries and territories, built on the ICE arrest records obtained and published by the Deportation Data Project. Monthly arrests in that group peaked at 1,950 in July 2026. New York accounts for 9.4 percent of Asian arrests nationally, third among the states, with 1,586 arrests of South and East Asians between January 20, 2025 and August 6, 2026.
Xu, A. (2026, September 17). ICE Arrests of Asian New Yorkers Increased Over 400% Under Trump, New Tracker Shows. Documented.
25
The number of states and jurisdictions the Justice Department has sued over in-state tuition for undocumented students, which is now all of them.So much for states’ rights. The associate attorney general said the department had now sued every state with a law or regulation granting in-state tuition to people in the country illegally. Of roughly 525,000 undocumented college students nationally, more than 180,000 are in states that have already ended the discount and about 220,000 are in states where the litigation continues. Most of the change so far has come from states declining to defend the laws rather than from any court finding them actually unlawful. A less educated public is never a good idea.
Sanchez, O. (2026, September 14). DOJ Sues All States With In-State Tuition for Noncitizens. Inside Higher Ed.
91:1
The federal government spends $91 on immigration enforcement to every $1 it spends enforcing wage, hour and safety law.The AFL-CIO and ACLU released a new report that estimates the true cost of ICE’s unregulated enforcement: the mass deportation agenda could eliminate nearly 6 million jobs, almost half of them held by U.S. citizens. Nearly 2 million people have already lost work authorization. Congress has committed at least $240 billion to immigration enforcement, while enforcing wage, hour and safety law gets a fraction of that. Liz Shuler, the federation’s president, put the politics of it plainly. “Working people know that it’s not an immigrant that stands between them and a good job—it’s the billionaires.”