After months of data silence, ICE released new detention numbers today that provide important new insights into the current state of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. As of July 11, the agency currently holds 65,765 people in custody across the country—up from 60,311 on April 4 but is below the record high of 70,766 on January 24 of this year. This number does not include people detained in short-term facilities along the border, in ICE field offices, courtrooms, or other locations where ICE has held people for immigration purposes.While detention numbers have grown over the past three months, the real story is not how many people are in detention but how people are getting into detention and how people are getting out.
ICE has been touting record-high arrest numbers this summer—and they are not wrong. The daily rate of ICE arrests in June was over 1,300, the highest month of the Trump administration, and in July that number increased again to a record 1,474 arrests per day for the first 11 days for which we have data. This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined. The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash. The rising death toll of ICE detention, not to mention the deadly shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, hardly points to a more disciplined, less rogue agency.
Of those people held in detention, the largest group continues to be immigrants with no criminal history whatsoever, reinforcing the now longstanding observation that the agency is not targeting the worst of the worst. In fact, the percentage of people in detention with nothing more than an actual or alleged immigration violation (with all of the utter meaninglessness that this administration has made of that category) continued to grow since April while the percentage of immigrants with charges or convictions declined as a percent of the total. These crude categories do not tell the whole story of the lives of people in detention, but I continue to present this as an important contextualizing data point.
Deportation continues to be the most common pathway, with most people almost certain to be deported once they enter detention. Even so, the total number of deportations has actually declined as a daily average since Mullin took his post, with 1,246 official ICE deportations per day in the three month period from early April to early July. Clearly that’s still much higher than previous years, but it prompts another question: how are people getting out of detention if not by deportation?
The answer comes from a new data point that ICE just started releasing this year, possibly because the agency wants to distinguish between cases where it releases someone voluntarily and cases where a judge forces it to. These “court ordered” releases reached 119 last October. By May it reached 2,017 in a single month, and it has run near that level since. Since January, court-ordered releases total 10,649, which makes it one of the largest non-removal exits from detention. Although the data doesn’t provide more granularity, it’s reasonable to assume that most or all of these are the result of habeas corpus lawsuits where judges have found that ICE is unlawfully holding people in civil custody. To put this number differently, about 25% of all non-deportation releases (and 4.5% of all releases, including deportations) were likely because ICE was holding someone unlawfully.
Note that the Trump administration has not, in fact, completely stopped releasing people from custody under orders of recognizance, bond, or parole, but certainly not at the rates of the Biden administration.
The reason that ICE has not released this data consistently this year comes down to two factors: the agency abhors transparency and Congress isn’t doing its job. Despite being awash in cash, ICE did not release detention data during the partial DHS shut down, nor has it released, until now, any data since congressional Republicans passed funding for the agency along a party line vote that tossed out basic transparency requirements. The now-routine biweekly detention data was mandated by appropriations language that had been included every year since 2018, language Republicans notably left out this time. It’s not entirely clear to me why they published this data set (they don’t seem to have any obligation to do so), but I’m glad they did