US immigration detention hits record high with over 60,000 held

The number of people in immigration detention reached a new high of more than 60,000 on Monday, breaking a modern record set during the first Trump administration, according to internal records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The number of detained people has jumped since January, when about 39,000 people were in immigration detention, reflecting efforts by the Trump administration to quickly ramp up arrests and deportations. According to ICE records obtained by The New York Times, more than 1,100 people had been detained since Friday, about 380 people a day.

The capacity for immigration officers to detain people has grown rapidly since ICE was formed in 2003. Twenty years ago, the average daily population of detained immigrants was about 7,000, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The previous peak since the government's current method of counting began was 55,654 in August 2019, during the first Trump administration.

The latest figures reflect the shifting focus of immigration policing: Most of the people detained in January had been arrested by Customs and Border Protection, the agency that patrols the nation's land borders, seaports and airports. ICE, which conducts immigration raids in the nation's interior, is now making the overwhelming majority of arrests six months into President Donald Trump's second term.

Trump has made his escalating immigration crackdown a focus of his second term. His administration, and his allies in Republican-led states, have devoted considerable effort to expanding the government's ability to arrest, detain and deport immigrants. Trump, who was reelected on a promise of mass deportations, has often expressed frustration that arrests and deportations are not rising more quickly.

Immigration arrests require extensive resources, including ample time for surveillance, and the Trump administration has laid out ambitious long-term plans to expand ICE, after Congress more than tripled the agency's budget from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion.

The military has also become increasingly involved in the escalating immigration crackdown: Days after Trump returned to the White House, the Pentagon authorized using a military base in Colorado to hold immigrants, and the administration has sent some migrants to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Last week, the Defense Department announced that it was building another detention facility at a military base in Texas with capacity for 5,000.

Late last month, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard units at immigration facilities, the most direct effort yet to meld military operations with domestic immigration enforcement.

Immigrant advocates expressed outrage at the growth of ICE detention during the Trump administration.

"The Trump administration is building an unprecedented detention system of extraordinary size and cruelty to terrorize immigrant communities," Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said detention had grown rapidly under Trump compared with past administrations.

"Compared to past administrations' records, this detention level is much, much higher -- almost twice as many noncitizens are being detained now as were under President Obama," she said.

But for as rapidly as detentions have risen, Bush-Joseph noted, the administration still remains far from its goal of 100,000 detention beds.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.