How many illegal immigrants are held by ICE?
Executive summary
As of late January 2026, independent trackers and ICE’s published rolls show roughly 69,000–73,000 people in ICE custody on any given day, with the widely cited single-day count of 70,766 reported by TRAC on January 25, 2026 [1]; other contemporaneous tallies from ICE’s own delayed reports and analysts place the population between 68,990 and about 73,000 depending on the date and the dataset used [2] [3] [4]. Variations reflect reporting lags, whether short-term border holdings are counted, and whether monitoring under Alternatives to Detention (ATD) is treated as “in custody” — ICE separately reports roughly 180,079 people in ATD programs as of January 24, 2026 [1] [5].
1. What the headline numbers say — a snapshot of ICE detention
TRAC’s daily snapshot that received wide circulation reported 70,766 people held in ICE detention on January 25, 2026, a figure drawn from ICE’s datasets and updated by TRAC’s tracking tools [1]; other contemporaneous counts include an ICE-derived single-day figure of 68,990 recorded earlier in January and reporting by outlets and analysts that peak the detained population in mid-January near 73,000, which together establish that the detained population is in the high‑tens of thousands at present [2] [3] [4].
2. Why different sources give different totals
ICE’s own data are explicit that numbers “may fluctuate until locked at the conclusion of the fiscal year” and that the agency cannot always attest to subsequent transmissions, meaning snapshot totals vary by date and by what facilities are included (field offices, short‑term Border Patrol holding areas, court custody) [6] [5]; independent trackers such as TRAC and researchers like Austin Kocher or the Deportation Data Project routinely adjust for these differences, producing slightly different single‑day and daily‑average counts [1] [2] [7].
3. What’s counted and what’s not: custody categories and ATD
The commonly reported “in detention” number refers to people held in ICE detention facilities or contracted beds, and does not always include short‑term Border Patrol cells, court holding, or people under electronic supervision — even though ICE separately reported about 180,079 people in Alternatives to Detention monitoring programs as of January 24, 2026, which many advocates argue are functionally part of ICE’s custody footprint [1] [4] [5].
4. The criminality breakdown and why it matters
Multiple trackers show the recent surge in detention has been driven largely by people held without criminal convictions: TRAC’s snapshot and analysts’ breakdowns indicate roughly three‑quarters of the detained population at the time had no criminal conviction — for example, TRAC’s January 25, 2026 dataset showed 52,504 of 70,766 detainees (about 74.2%) had no criminal conviction — a point emphasized by advocacy groups and researchers who frame this as an administrative, not criminal, system expansion [1] [2].
5. Humanitarian, political and bureaucratic drivers behind the totals
Journalistic investigations and policy analyses link the jump in detention to deliberate enforcement choices, new funding and programmatic priorities — for instance, reporting shows ICE touring large warehouses as potential mass‑detention sites amid a broader push to expand capacity, and congressional budget allocations have signaled increased detention funding — which helps explain why bed‑counts and detainee totals have climbed rapidly [8] [9] [10].
6. What the numbers cannot tell with certainty
The public datasets and the journalism around them make clear that single‑day counts are precise only to the reporting date and the inventory of facilities ICE includes; they do not capture short‑term border custody consistently, they fluctuate until year‑end “locking,” and some third‑party summaries conflate detained individuals and those under electronic monitoring, so any single figure should be read as a contemporaneous snapshot rather than a permanent census [6] [4] [3].
7. Bottom line
The best, sourced answer is that ICE was holding roughly 69,000–73,000 people in detention facilities in mid‑ to late‑January 2026, with TRAC’s often‑cited single‑day snapshot at 70,766 on January 25, 2026; a substantially larger number — about 180,079 — were enrolled in ICE Alternatives to Detention programs at a similar date, and both figures are subject to the reporting caveats ICE and independent trackers describe [1] [2] [5].