Five key ways ICE detention centers are booming under Trump
ICE detention has expanded rapidly under Trump, both in terms of the number of facilities and people held.
Donald Trump's second presidency has brought sweeping changes to immigration enforcement. One of the top takeaways: ICE detention has expanded dramatically, both in the number of people being held and the sites holding them.
Here are five key things to know about immigration detention today.
ICE is holding a record number of people in detention
Trump kick-started his promised "mass deportation" campaign in 2025 with a series of executive orders that paved the way for a stricter application of immigration law and for new policies to expand enforcement.
A year in, arrests of undocumented immigrants have climbed dramatically. The pace of deportation flights – while rising – hasn't quite kept up. The result is that more people are being held in detention for longer.
Nearly 69,000 people were in ICE detention on Jan. 7, 2026, according to snapshot data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That figure eclipses the number of detainees last year, which reached fewer than 38,000 people in early January 2025, before Trump took office.
Trump's orders for ICE to "maximize" detention and end discretionary releases of immigrants have driven the rise in the detained population, according to a reportby the American Immigration Council, an advocacy organization that promotes fairness in immigration policy. A separate order forcing immigration judges to deny bond to large swaths of immigrants means more are fighting their case to remain in the United States from inside detention.
"With the administration sending more people to detention centers, fewer people are being permitted to leave them while they fight their cases," the report says.
There are more ICE detention centers than ever
ICE holds undocumented immigrants in a variety of detention settings. They include privately run, dedicated immigration detention centers; temporary tent facilities on military bases; county jails; and state prisons.
The number of ICE detention centers exploded in 2025, driven by an increase in the number of county jails holding immigrants for ICE, but also in the arrival of alternative sites like Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas; or the Florida-run "Alligator Alcatraz" outside Miami.
Most recently, the administration began contemplating buying and converting large warehouses into detention centers.
"Now they want something more industrialized, more mechanized," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a coauthor of the report. "A few massive, mega facilities where they can hold tens of thousands of people. Whether it will happen is unclear."
There were 107 detention centers holding immigrants in early January 2025. By year's end, the number had roughly doubled to 212, according to ICE data.
People detained without a criminal charge, record is surging
The American Immigration Council report tracked a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day.
Other researchers have underscored the trend.
"We've never seen detention numbers this high," said Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher at Syracuse University. "The growth in immigrant detention in the last four months has come almost exclusively from detaining people with no criminal history whatsoever."
In a departure from practice during Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the Trump administration considers anyone who crossed the border illegally a "criminal," according to an opinion in June from the Justice Department. The opinion suggests any immigrant "who eludes examination is like a convict who escapes from federal custody."
Deaths are at their highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic
More people in immigration detention means more deaths in custody, too.
The agency has publicly reported 15 deaths from Jan. 23 through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2025. A congressional memo in November counted 25 deaths in ICE custody since the start of the calendar year, and The Guardian news outlet, compiling from various sources, counted 32 deaths in 2025.
Issues with subpar care in immigration detention facilities are long-standing and predate the second Trump administration.
A 2024 ACLU report reviewed three years of in-custody deaths during the first Trump and Biden administrations and found 95% of ICE detention deaths could have been prevented with adequate care. The report cited "flawed internal oversight mechanisms and failure to provide adequate medical and mental health care" in ICE custody settings.
ICE has more money to expand immigration detention
Congress authorized $45 billion in funding to expand ICE detention, on top of the agency's already approved $4 billion appropriation.
That breaks down to an annual budget of nearly $15 billion, two times larger than the annual budget for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to the American Immigration Council report.
The report calculates that with the additional money, ICE could acquire enough detention beds to house 135,000 people at any given time. The United States hasn't held that many people outside the criminal justice system since the internment of people of Japanese, German and Italian descent during World War II.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration restrictions, said ICE needed the additional money to improve processing "to move people through the system" and stop releases from detention centers.
"They don't want to have to release people because there is no space for them," she said.
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY and can be reached at [email protected].