How many lawful permanent residents (green card holders) were detained by ICE in 2025, by month and by state?
Executive summary
A precise count of lawful permanent residents (LPRs, “green card holders”) detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2025, broken down by month and by state, cannot be produced from the reporting provided: the public datasets and analyses cited here document overall arrests, book‑ins, detention populations and trends but do not publish a complete month‑by‑month, state‑by‑state tabulation of detainees identified specifically as LPRs in 2025 [1] [2] [3]. The available sources point to where such disaggregated data might exist (DHS/OHSS and ICE internal operational datasets) and also explain why independent researchers have struggled to isolate LPR counts in the Deportation Data Project and FOIA releases [4] [1] [3].
1. What the official public datasets show — and do not show
DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) produces monthly enforcement tables and cites an operational “Persist” dataset constructed from agencies’ operational reports that is updated monthly [1], and ICE publishes summary enforcement dashboards and detention statistics through year‑end reports [2], but neither the OHSS pages nor ICE’s public dashboards provide a straightforward table in the public releases that lists “LPR detainees by month by state for 2025” in one place [1] [2].
2. What independent datasets and FOIA releases reveal, and their limits
Research projects and FOIA‑based compilations such as the Deportation Data Project and Vera’s detention dashboard provide granular arrest and detention timelines and facility‑level snapshots and have been used to analyze arrests by location and shifting enforcement patterns in 2025, yet those datasets often lack consistent identifiers or citizenship/status flags that would reliably isolate LPRs across every month and state [4] [3]. Prison Policy’s analysis notes specific difficulties in tracing individuals when ICE transfers or missing identifiers obscure origin or initial arrest location [4].
3. Numbers that are available and relevant proxies
Multiple trackers reported dramatic rises in overall interior arrests and detention populations in 2025 — monthly arrest surges, daily averages of hundreds to thousands of arrests, and national detention populations reaching record highs by late 2025 — which demonstrate scale but not LPR composition: ICE and independent trackers reported spikes in monthly arrests (averages reaching hundreds per day and peaks in mid‑2025) and detention counts exceeding 65,000–68,000 by late 2025 [4] [2] [5] [6]. These totals are useful context but cannot substitute for an LPR‑specific monthly/state breakdown without further disaggregation [2] [5].
4. Why isolating LPR detainees is technically and politically fraught
Researchers attempting to identify LPRs face technical barriers—missing or inconsistent status markers, cross‑state transfers, and aggregated reporting—and political constraints—agency decisions about what to publish and litigation that sometimes forces release of partial datasets—so even FOIA‑based projects can only approximate counts or analyze subsets [4] [3]. Analysts also warn that a rising share of arrests involve people without criminal convictions, complicating narratives about who is being detained [7] [8].
5. Paths to get the requested breakdown (and likely timelines)
The most direct route to the exact monthly-by-state LPR detention counts would be to obtain the OHSS Persist dataset (or ICE’s internal ERO operational extracts) with status/citizenship fields, either via OHSS public monthly tables if OHSS publishes that slice or via targeted FOIA requests to ICE/OHSS asking explicitly for 2025 book‑ins/detentions filtered by “lawful permanent resident” by month and state; prior FOIA releases have supplied similar operational records to researchers, though often with redactions or identifier gaps [1] [4] [3]. Given past timelines, such FOIA responses and the subsequent cleaning and verification could take weeks to months.
6. Alternative viewpoints and implicit agendas in the reporting
Advocacy and research groups highlight civil‑liberties harms and emphasize that many detained people lack criminal records [9] [8], which can motivate pressure for more granular transparency on LPR detentions; by contrast, ICE and some federal narratives emphasize enforcement totals and public‑safety framing, which may deprioritize publishing status‑disaggregated monthly/state tables—readers should therefore weigh both transparency goals and institutional incentives when evaluating why the specific data requested is not already public [2] [9].
Exact month‑by‑month, state‑by‑state counts of lawful permanent residents detained by ICE in 2025 are not present in the supplied reporting; the path to obtain them is clear (OHSS/ICE operational data or FOIA), but until those records are released in the necessary detail, any numeric answer would be speculative based on the available sources [1] [4] [3].