The number of immigrants confined in federal detention facilities has surged past 65,000, perhaps the highest figure ever and a two-thirds increase since President Donald Trump took office in January.
The 65,135 in custody across the nation represents a shattering of the 60,000 threshold, which was last passed briefly in August before dropping back down. The new figure is up from 39,238 when Trump was inaugurated, as his administration quickly undertook an unprecedented campaign to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants.
“It’s quite stunning,” said Jonah Eaton, a Philadelphia immigration attorney who teaches about detention at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law. “They are dead serious about moving as many people out of the country as possible, and keeping them detained while they do it.”
The data, current as of Nov. 16, come from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an information-and-research organization that obtains information from ICE and other federal agencies.
An ICE spokesperson said the agency could not comment on statistics compiled by third parties.
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The Trump administration says it is arresting the “worst of the worst,” criminal immigrants who have committed serious and sometimes violent offenses. But the new data show ― as they consistently have ― that 74% of those in detention have no criminal convictions.
“The question is ‘What’s going to be the ceiling for this?’ as the administration has designs to expand the capacity to detain individuals as arrests increase,” said Cris Ramon, an independent immigration consultant in Washington. “If the goal is to remove as many people as possible, they’re going to be leaning on the detention centers to be, first and foremost, a staging ground.”
Ramon said he was not surprised by the high detention numbers, given the Trump administration’s determination to carry out large-scale operations in cities like Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago.
The new figures show that more of those in custody are being arrested by ICE, rather than by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that conducts inspections at airports and other ports of entry and includes the Border Patrol.
Today 81% of people in detention were arrested by ICE, up from 38% when Trump took office. The president has demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement make more arrests more quickly, and won new funding to encourage that.
The agency generally operates in the interior United States.
Many of those arrested in Pennsylvania are sent to the largest detention center in the Northeast, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center near Philipsburg, Pa. Moshannon, as it is known, is a private, 1,876-bed immigration prison operated by the Florida-based GEO Group Inc.
ICE also holds detainees at the Clinton County Correctional Facility and the Pike County Correctional Facility. And this year the agency began confining people at the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center in Center City.
New Jersey has two detention facilities, in Newark and Elizabeth, and might be getting a third, in South Jersey. The administration plans to hold detainees at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, one of two military sites that have been designated for that purpose. The other is Camp Atterbury in Indiana.
Many of those in custody are subject to “mandatory detention,” meaning they are not allowed to seek release on bond. In the summer, the administration announced a policy change that prevented immigration judges from granting bond to anyone in detention who had entered the United States without documentation.
The result, according to the National Immigration Law Center, is that the Trump administration has ensured that migrants have almost no way out of detention “other than death or deportation.”
ICE is arresting, detaining, and refusing to release far more people than before, the law center said, including many who rarely would have been held in the past.
In Philadelphia and elsewhere, some immigrants have showed up for routine in-person appointments or check-ins, only to be handcuffed and taken into detention. Green-card applicants, asylum-seekers, and others who have ongoing legal or visa cases have been unexpectedly detained.
Immigration detention is civil in nature, to hold people as they progress through their court cases or await deportation. It is not supposed to be a punishment.
When Joe Biden assumed the presidency in 2021, there were 14,195 people in immigration detention. That figure more than doubled during his term and eventually topped 39,000.
“Trump’s cruel mass detention and deportation agenda has reached a previously unimaginable scope and scale,” Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director at Detention Watch Network in Washington, said in a statement.
She called the new detention figure “a grim reminder” of a larger plan that is “targeting people based on where they work and what they look like, destabilizing communities, separating families, and putting people’s lives at risk.”
ICE holds detainees across the country, in ICE facilities, in federal prisons, in privately owned lockups, and in state and local jails. As detentions have surged, so has the need for places to house people.
As of this summer, ICE detained people in all 50 states as well as in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Vera Institute of Justice in New York.
Texas had the most facilities with 69, and Florida was second with 40, the institute said.
