According to the latest data released by ICE last Monday (see my previous analysis), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has now booked over 600,000 people into detention since Trump took office. Typically I report the total number of people currently in custody (~65,000 right now), but this cumulative perspective on the data provides a more comprehensive look at how many people have passed through the gates into civil immigration detention facilities.¹ The scale of book-ins is an important indicator, too, of how many marriages, families, workplaces, faith centers, and sports leagues have been touched in some way. And what’s more, this is how many people are pulled out of the U.S. workforce given that the vast majority of people are of working age.
How did I make this graph? This graph was created using the ICE detention management spreadsheets going back to the start of the Trump administration (and my database of these sheets for several years). I used available data to estimate the number of daily book-ins for the period starting on January 20, 2025 through the next data spreadsheet, used actual data through to the last update in FY 2025 (near the end of September), estimated the final book-ins through September 30, then picked up again with actual data starting on October 1, 2025, continued up until July 11, 2026, then estimated through the end of July using the most recent data. Just simple averages to fill in unknown values, nothing fancy.
As my frequent readers know, I take very few liberties with the data. I rarely speculate, project, predict, or prognosticate unless (a) I have substantial research to support it or (b) I’m undertaking some thought experiment. Today is a (b) day. The graph of cumulative book-ins over time seemed awfully linear, so that got me thinking: if this trend continues, how many people will be booked in by the end of the year? And by the end of the Trump administration?²
To do this, I used the average daily book-in rate for FY 2026 so far (October 1 to July 11), and extrapolated out through January 19, 2029, presumably Trump’s last day in office (although given his age, he could leave office sooner, and given his hubris, he may not leave even in 2029). Using this simple projection based on current FY 2026 ICE operations, we would expect ICE to book in over 800,000 people by the end of this calendar year and 1.75 million people by the end of his term. Even though these are just projections, it does put the scale of immigration enforcement in a longer-term perspective.
Although this is really a thought experiment, the linearity of the data so far suggests that these estimates are entirely plausible. The real proof will be how well actual data hews to projected data. Of course, we can’t reliably do this now because Republicans decided to close the door on ICE’s biweekly detention spreadsheets, so unless the agency continues to publish the data as they did last week—and kudos to them if they do!—the public will remain mostly in the dark about the reality of detention.
On a related note, most of these 600,000+ people won’t spend (or haven’t spent) another free day in the United States after entering detention, since most people are deported instead of released back into the country. This trend changed significantly and suddenly at the start of the Trump administration with a sudden increase from 60% of detentions resulting in removal to over 90% of detentions result in removal—although that total has now dipped below 80% (I explain why in my previous detention post, linked above).³
So here is where things stand. In the year and a half since January 20, 2025, ICE has booked close to 600,000 people into detention, and if the current pace holds the total will pass 800,000 by the end of this year and reach something like 1.75 million by the time this term ends in January 2029. Roughly 65,000 people are in detention on any given day, and a growing share of the people who leave detention are not being released back into their communities but deported, up from about 60 percent under Biden to around 80 percent now.
The administration is stripping legal status from people who have held it for years, which turns lawful residents into people ICE can detain and deport. In June the Supreme Court cleared the government to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians while litigation continues, and the same legal reasoning reaches the rest of the program, close to a million people from countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Syria.
At the same time, the immigration courts are being used to manufacture removal orders in bulk through the mega master hearings I wrote about earlier today, where a single morning can put more than a hundred people, most of them without a lawyer, on a path to deportation. In June alone, 210 of these hearings across 24 courts swept up more than 27,000 people. Every one of those moves expands the population of people who can be booked into detention, which means the totals in this post are more likely a floor than a ceiling.
1
Definitional note: ICE’s detention management spreadsheets do not have a way of disaggregating book-ins from people, so technically this is 600,000 book-ins and the total number of people is 600,000 – n, with n being the number of book-ins of individuals who have been booked in more than once. In a more technical article where the distinction mattered more, I would be more precise—but the delta is not so large that it matters for the purposes of this particular post. Double-counting was a huge deal during the Title 42 policy where the difference between encounters and people generated real misinformation and people online were justifiably correcting this mistake constantly. Double-counting is always an issue in event-centered rather than person-centered databases, and it’s true here, too. I just think it’s a matter of editorial judgement about how much to harp on this depending on the rhetoric situation. The other analytical issue here is that while people are booked more than once, at the level of most reporting—i.e., each month—that number is very low. So when we’re saying that 10,000 people were booked this month and 10,000 people were booked the next month, we are double counting people in total (10,000 + 10,000 ≠ 20,000), but at the level of monthly data, it still is mostly individual people, it just accumulates for analytical purposes so unless you want to constantly explain to readers why 10,000 and 10,000 doesn’t equal 20,000, I’m sort of okay with saying “people” instead of belaboring the point. Final point: most people are deported, so the likelihood that someone is re-detained is lower than if more people were being released into the country. Anyway, what do you think: agree or disagree on this writing point? I could be persuaded otherwise.
2
The immigration system is generally too unpredictable and politically driven to make simple projections such as this count as anything more than a back-of-the-envelope thought experiment. Immigration enforcement is not the stock market, and I have yet to be so much as modestly impressed with attempts to apply predictive analysis to immigration enforcement data—but if someone has findings that will blow my mind, feel free to send it my way.
3
This really is a place where double-counting is a big deal. Once we start stitching together people going through the entire process, we find that the rate of deportation once someone enters detention once is ultimately higher than any single given snapshot reveals, since that same person is at higher risk of going back into detention and being deported. There’s also the fact that even people who are released from detention into the U.S. may leave the country by other means, with or without a removal order.