How many detained by ICE are legal immigrants?
Executive summary
As of late 2025 and early January 2026, ICE was holding roughly 69,000–70,000 people in custody, a historic high driven largely by the agency’s expanded interior arrests and detention expansion [1] [2] [3]. Available public reporting and agency datasets do not, however, provide a clear, authoritative breakdown of how many of those detained are “legal immigrants” (lawful permanent residents, refugees/asylees, DACA recipients, or other lawfully present noncitizens), and independent sources caution that the data are incomplete and opaque [4] [5].
1. The headline numbers — how many people are in ICE custody right now
Multiple independent trackers and policy researchers reported that ICE’s detained population surged across 2025 and into January 2026, with snapshots showing about 66,000–69,000 people in detention by early December and early January respectively, and analyses saying the daily detained population approached nearly 70,000 at the start of January 2026 [3] [1] [2]. These totals are the best available anchor for any attempt to estimate subgroups within the detained population [1].
2. What “legal immigrant” would mean, and why the data don’t map cleanly to that label
“Legal immigrant” can denote several categories—U.S. lawful permanent residents (green card holders), asylees or refugees, recipients of programs like DACA, or noncitizen visa-holders lawfully present—and ICE’s public statistics and third‑party databases do not publish a regular, reliable breakdown of detainees by those legal-status categories [4] [5]. ICE’s own public materials describe custody determinations by immigration history and criminal records but do not provide a routine tabulation showing how many detainees hold lawful-status classifications versus being undocumented [4].
3. What the reporting does show about citizenship and criminality among detainees
Investigations and reporting show that a meaningful number of people with lawful ties to the United States have been detained: advocates and journalists documented detained DACA recipients and green card holders detained after arrests [3], and national watchdog reviews have found instances of U.S. citizens and people asserting citizenship being arrested or detained by ICE in recent years [6] [7]. Independent trackers and press analyses also report that a large share of detainee growth comes from people without criminal convictions—reports estimate that most of the surge in detention in late 2025 involved non‑criminal detainees, with figures such as 72–75% of growth attributed to people with no criminal convictions [1] [8].
4. Why definitive counts of “legal immigrants” in custody are not available
Researchers and reporters repeatedly flag limits in federal and public datasets—missing identifiers, inconsistent recording across facilities, and exclusion of some state or short‑term holding locations from ICE’s official counts—that prevent a clean, public accounting of detainees’ precise immigration categories [5] [9]. Congressional and watchdog reporting has shown occasional case counts (for example, GAO investigations of citizen deportations and detentions in earlier years), but these are episodic and do not translate into a current, comprehensive tally of lawful-status detainees across ICE’s vastly expanded network [6].
5. What can responsibly be concluded now
There is no authoritative public source among the reporting reviewed that gives a single, verified number of “how many detained by ICE are legal immigrants.” The detained population total is well documented at roughly 66,000–70,000 during the period reviewed [3] [1] [2], and reporting documents numerous individual and systemic examples of lawful permanent residents, DACA recipients, refugees/asylees, and even U.S. citizens being caught up in enforcement [3] [6] [7]. But turning those documented instances into an overall percentage or count of lawful‑status detainees is not possible from the public data released to date [4] [5].
6. Implications and what to look for next
To answer the question with precision would require ICE or DHS to publish standardized, disaggregated detention data that identify immigration status categories for everyone held (something trackers and researchers say is missing), or for independent researchers to access person‑level records with appropriate privacy protections [5] [9]. Until that transparency appears, reporting will continue to document notable individual cases of lawful‑status detainees while the overall share remains uncertain [3] [1].