Breakdown of ICE detentions by state since January 2025
Executive summary
Since January 2025 ICE detention has grown rapidly and shifted geographically: Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona and Georgia have been the primary anchors of the expanded system, with Texas—particularly El Paso facilities—housing the largest daily populations, while ICE has also surged into many more local jails and reopened previously closed sites across roughly 40 states [1] [2] [3] [4]. The public dashboards and advocacy datasets document the national trend but stop short of a fully granular, state-by-state accounting that is current through January 2026, leaving significant gaps that make precise per‑state tallies difficult [5] [6] [7].
1. National trend: rapid expansion and concentration in certain states
Federal reporting and independent trackers show a steep increase in people detained after January 2025, with ICE’s average detained population rising from roughly 39,000 in January 2025 toward figures in the tens of thousands by late 2025—numbers tracked by TRAC, Migration Policy and Project On Government Oversight—while ICE simultaneously broadened the footprint of facilities used across the country [8] [3] [4] [1].
2. States with the largest shares of detainees: Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona, Georgia
Multiple organizations identify a recurring set of states that hold the most ICE detainees: Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona and Georgia consistently appear as the states with the highest totals; TRAC and Immigrant Justice highlighted Texas and the Southwest/Southeast concentration, and Migration Policy singled out Louisiana as a busy deportation hub that funneled tens of thousands through a single Alexandria airport‑tarmac facility earlier in 2025 [1] [2] [3].
3. Texas and El Paso: the epicenter in data and reporting
TRAC’s reporting specifically names an El Paso facility—Camp East Montana—as the single site with the largest daily average in FY2026, and ICE’s reliance on Texas facilities is repeatedly emphasized across datasets, marking Texas as the principal state in which expanded detention capacity translated into the largest detainee counts [1].
4. How ICE expanded capacity and redistributed detainees across states
Investigations document that ICE added and reopened scores of facilities in 2025—Project On Government Oversight reports 59 new facilities and 77 reopenings by mid‑December—while the American Immigration Council counted roughly 104 more facilities in use by late November, a near doubling of sites and a shift toward using local jails and nontraditional facilities across states [4] [9]. Vera’s mapping also shows a tripling of people in civil immigration detention within local jails, underscoring how state and local institutions became central to the surge [10].
5. Who is being detained and where data show major policy effects
Reporting notes that a large share of the increased population includes people without criminal convictions and many arrested in community raids; analyses from Prison Policy and POGO document that policy shifts in early 2025 drove higher arrest rates and a surge in detention, which manifested unevenly across states depending on local cooperation with ICE and facility availability [7] [4] [11]. The Marshall Project documents cases in Georgia that typify how traffic and minor offenses have fed detention pipelines [12].
6. Data limitations and why a precise, current state‑by‑state breakdown is elusive
ICE provides biweekly and quarterly dashboards and has released datasets, but researchers warn of missing identifiers, reporting lags, and limited transparency about individual facility counts; the Deportation Data Project and independent analysts note that data released through October 2025 are useful but incomplete for constructing a fully current, validated state‑by‑state tally through January 2026 [5] [6] [7]. Multiple sources explicitly caution that while state trends and hot spots are clear, the public record does not consistently permit a definitive numeric breakdown by state for the entire period since January 2025 [6] [13].
7. Bottom line and reporting implications
The safest, evidence‑based summary is that ICE’s detention population has surged since January 2025 and that most of that growth is concentrated in a set of states—Texas (notably El Paso), Louisiana, California, Arizona and Georgia—while a broad network of reopened and new facilities across roughly 40 states absorbed the rest; however, compiling a precise, up‑to‑the‑week per‑state table requires access to the full ICE field datasets and cleaned, identifiable records that public releases and third‑party repositories do not yet provide [1] [2] [4] [6].