Immigration detention in the United States

For more information on Americans being detained and deported, see Detention and deportation of American citizens in the second Trump administration.

The United States government detains immigrants under the control of Customs and Border Protection (CBP; principally the Border Patrol) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

According to the Global Detention Project, the United States possesses the largest immigration detention system in the world. As of 2020, ICE detains immigrants in over 200 detention facilities, in state and local jails, in juvenile detention centers, and in shelters. Immigrants may be detained for unlawful/illegal entry to the United States, when their claims for asylum are received (and prior to release into the United States by parole), during the process of immigration proceedings, undergoing removal from the country, or if they are subject to mandatory detention.

During Fiscal Year 2023, 273,220 people were booked into ICE custody. As of FY 2023, the daily average population of non-citizens being detained by ICE was 28,289, however, at the end of the same fiscal year there was a total of 36,845 noncitizens being currently detained. In addition, as of April 2024, roughly 7,000 immigrant children are housed by facilities under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement's (ORR) program for Unaccompanied Children (UC). For the FY 2023, the ORR reported 118,938 unaccompanied children referrals from DHS to be processed into the UC program. Detention and deportations greatly increased during the second presidency of Donald Trump. By January 2026, the administration would have deported more than 370,000 immigrants.

In mid-February 2026, Reuters reported that in the previous few months, over 400 federal judges had ruled that ICE had illegally jailed aliens a total of 4,421 times, and according to Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Trica McLaughlin, that "President Trump and Secretary Noem were now enforcing the law and arresting illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country and reversed (former President Joe) Biden's 'catch and release' policy."

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.