Which US cities have recent reports of ICE detaining homeless people (2024–2025)?
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Executive summary
Recent reporting and advocacy materials from 2024–2025 document ICE detentions tied to people experiencing homelessness in and around Los Angeles (including Adelanto) and in Oakland, and multiple advocacy groups and legal guides assert broader targeting of homeless populations, but federal ICE datasets do not categorize detainees by housing status, leaving the national scope indeterminate [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Where reporting identifies specific cities
Local reporting and watchdogs most concretely tie ICE detentions of people without stable housing to the Los Angeles area — with recent sweeps in Los Angeles and detainees held at the GEO-run facility in Adelanto — and to encampment clearings in Oakland that intersect with immigration enforcement, making Los Angeles/Adelanto and Oakland the clearest, on-the-record municipal examples in 2024–2025 [1] [2].
2. What the primary sources say about these incidents
LAist’s coverage describes “recent sweeps” in Los Angeles with people seized and held at an ICE detention center in Adelanto, establishing a direct link between local enforcement actions and ICE custody in that region [1]. Oakland-focused reporting on encampment management documents city sweeps and razing of encampments in 2025, with analyses framing those actions as part of a broader pattern that can expose homeless people to detention or referral to enforcement agencies [2]. National advocacy networks such as Housing Not Handcuffs compiled resources and warnings in early 2025 asserting that ICE and allied policies have targeted people experiencing homelessness, which corroborates local accounts and alerts service providers [3].
3. What federal data and national analyses reveal — and conceal
ICE’s public dashboards track arrests, detentions and removals but do not flag whether detained individuals were homeless at the time of arrest, a gap ICE explicitly acknowledges in how its statistics are presented and locked at fiscal year end, which prevents a tidy national tally of homelessness-linked detentions from ICE datasets alone [4]. Policy researchers and prison-policy advocates have documented intensified city-by-city raids and rising detention counts in 2025, but those analyses typically aggregate arrests by jurisdiction or custody numbers rather than by housing status, leaving inferences about the scale of homeless-targeted detentions dependent on local reporting and advocacy logs rather than a standardized federal variable [5].
4. How advocacy groups, public defenders and service providers frame the problem
Homeless-rights and immigrant-rights organizations invested in this issue issued guides for service providers and "know your rights" materials in 2025 aimed at preparing shelters and outreach workers for ICE encounters, arguing that the pattern of sweeps and raids disproportionately imperils people living outdoors and in encampments; these materials assert targeting on the ground even where formal federal statistics are silent [6] [3]. Such groups also emphasize that municipal encampment management practices — like the Oakland razings documented in 2025 — can create intersections between homelessness interventions and immigration enforcement, an implicit critique of local policy choices that may expose vulnerable people to federal detention [2] [3].
5. Caveats, alternative interpretations and reporting limits
Reporting and advocacy studies point to Los Angeles/Adelanto and Oakland as documented sites where homeless people were detained or at risk of detention, but there is no comprehensive, source-backed national list in the materials provided because ICE’s official statistics do not record housing status and many watchdog reports aggregate by city or state without that variable; therefore claims of a nationwide pattern rest on a combination of local case reporting, advocacy documentation, and analyses of intensified enforcement rather than a single, nationally standardized dataset [1] [2] [4] [5]. Alternative perspectives from ICE or municipal officials asserting routine safeguarding of due process or disputing claims of targeted sweeps are not present in the supplied reporting, so this analysis cannot assess their counterarguments beyond noting that federal data collection limits complicate independent verification [4].
Conclusion
The strongest, attributable evidence in the supplied reporting for 2024–2025 points to Los Angeles (with detainees held in Adelanto) and Oakland as cities where ICE detentions have intersected with homelessness, while national advocacy groups and service-oriented guides assert broader targeting but federal ICE datasets lack the housing-status detail needed to produce a definitive national list [1] [2] [3] [4].