More than 45,000 people were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, the highest number since Donald Trump retook office, according to data the Deportation Data Project released Monday.
In total, since Trump’s inauguration last year, ICE has detained over 610,000 people — more than the population of Atlanta, Baltimore, Milwaukee or the entire state of Wyoming.
At times, previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have booked hundreds of thousands of people into ICE custody for processing. But in Trump’s second term, the number of people ICE booked and then held for extended periods of time has ballooned.
Last year, more than 270,000 people spent at least a week detained, surpassing any other year since 2012, the earliest in the Deportation Data Project’s archive. However, even as Trump's enforcement upends lives and livelihoods in immigrant communities, the number of people detained and deported falls far short of the president's goal of deporting 1 million people per year.
The Trump administration’s policy is to detain almost all unauthorized immigrants, regardless of their individual circumstances, and to keep them detained as long as it takes for their cases to move through immigration court — often months, or even years.
Both the Biden and Obama administrations oversaw enormous spikes in book-ins to ICE detention amid increases in migrants arriving at the Southern border, including unaccompanied children in 2012 and single adults in 2023. Many of those people were not locked up for long; instead, they were processed and then released to the community — where it is easier to challenge their deportations — while their cases played out in immigration courts.
Since Trump returned to office, border crossings have dropped precipitously. And yet ICE detentions, especially long-term, remain among the highest in the timeframe covered by the data.
The other major difference between today’s immigration detention machine and that of prior administrations, including Trump’s first term, is where and how the arrests and detentions are taking place.
About 80% of people detained since Trump retook office have come from the interior of the country, where they are much more likely to have community ties — families, jobs, homes — than those crossing the border. That’s almost a complete reversal of the practice during the previous two years under President Joe Biden, when 30% of detentions came from inside the U.S.
“What we’re seeing is something unprecedented,” said Caitlin Patler, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies immigration. “Going after people where they work, where they pray, in the streets, at the schools. These are these places that in the past you wouldn't really have seen ICE arrests happening at scale.”
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor who studies immigration at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, warned of the lasting impact on a generation of people in the cities hit hardest by Trump’s immigration tactics, like Chicago and Minneapolis.
“People who are detained lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose the money that is needed to pay for food, medical care, school supplies,” Hernández says. “Those are the kind of direct impacts that don’t go away the moment the refrigerator is stocked again, or the electricity is paid.”
Others, who are deported, are not able to return to their homes at all.
“The administration lost a lot of goodwill from a lot of people who thought they were going to remove bad people,” said Sarah Saldaña, who served as director of ICE from 2014 to 2017. “They've done everything to make it look like a lawless-enforcement agency.”
Some people arrested and detained in the last year had already been released from custody by judges during previous administrations with agreements to attend their immigration court hearings.
For many of these people, nothing about their lives or cases has changed to warrant incarceration, said Amy Romero, an immigration attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Rhode Island, who is representing many people in this situation.
“The only thing that’s changed is we now have an administration that is hell-bent on imprisoning as many immigrants as possible,” she said.
