Per state, how many people have been detained, arrested, and/or deported by ICE and/or CBP in 2025 and 2026?
Executive summary
Official federal summaries and independent reconstructions show hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, detained, or removed by ICE and CBP across 2025–early 2026, but the sources available do not publish a clean, authoritative per‑state accounting for those two calendar years; the best public figures are national totals and partial datasets that cover specific periods or fiscal years [1] [2] [3]. Any attempt to supply "per state" counts for 2025 and 2026 must therefore rely on amalgamating FOIA releases, biweekly ICE tables, DHS monthly tables, and third‑party reconstructions — each of which has gaps, coding changes, and potential overlaps between CBP and ICE reporting [4] [1] [5].
1. Data reality check: what the government publishes and where it falls short
ICE posts biweekly detention statistics and DHS publishes monthly enforcement tables, but neither consistently provides a neat, verified per‑state tally that covers calendar years 2025 and 2026 end‑to‑end; ICE’s reporting has changed formats mid‑2025 and contains incomplete location identifiers, while DHS monthly tables are released with a reporting lag of roughly 45 days [1] [6] [5]. Independent projects — including the Deportation Data Project and analysts at TRAC, Migration Policy Institute, and academic FOIA work — have reconstructed case‑level datasets for portions of 2024–2025, but those reconstructions specifically warn of missing fields, shifts in coding, and overlap between CBP and ICE removal counts that make a simple per‑state roll‑up unreliable without additional matching and methodological choices [4] [2] [7].
2. What can be stated with confidence at the national level
Across FY2025 and into FY2026 the scale of enforcement rose markedly: independent analysts estimate hundreds of thousands of deportations in 2025 with MPI reporting roughly 234,000 interior ICE removals and another 166,000 by CBP during the first 250 days of the administration’s second term, and other trackers placing total removals (FY2025 + early FY2026) near 290,000 as compiled from ICE releases and TRAC summaries [8] [2] [3]. ICE itself reported 56,392 removals so far in FY2026 and detention populations climbed from about 40,000 at the start of 2025 to roughly 65,000–66,000 by late 2025, indicating intensified detention and removals even if state breakdowns are not centrally published [3] [9].
3. Where per‑state numbers do exist — and their limits
Per‑state counts can be extracted in pieces: ICE’s biweekly "Currently Detained" and "Removals" tables and certain FOIA case lists archived by the Deportation Data Project allow researchers to derive arrests, book‑ins, and removals tied to field offices and sometimes counties or states, but analysts caution that missing identifiers, changes in ICE coding, transfers (e.g., people arrested in one jurisdiction processed in another), and CBP/ICE overlap mean state totals require careful cleaning and cross‑matching [1] [4] [7]. The Prison Policy Initiative’s analysis and TRAC’s monthly summaries demonstrate this work is possible for defined windows (for example May–October 2025) but also show important mismatches that prevent a single, authoritative per‑state table for all of 2025 and 2026 without primary‑data reconciliation [7] [10].
4. How to get the per‑state numbers responsibly and next steps for researchers
Researchers seeking per‑state tallies should start with ICE’s biweekly detention and removals tables and DHS’s monthly enforcement tables, then merge them with FOIA case‑level dumps hosted by the Deportation Data Project or obtained directly from ICE, and use TRAC/Prison Policy/Guardian archives for cross‑checks while documenting assumptions about transfers and overlaps; the sources above explain both availability and the pitfalls and are the only ones that justify state‑level reconstruction [1] [4] [5] [10]. Care should be taken to flag DHS and White House statements that make large, aggregate claims (for example DHS claims about “nearly 3 million” removals or self‑deportations) which are politically charged and not corroborated line‑by‑line in the public datasets [11]. Because the provided sources do not include a ready per‑state roll‑up for calendar years 2025–2026, this report declines to invent state counts and instead points analysts to the datasets and caveats necessary to produce defensible per‑state figures [4] [2].