ICE Detention Numbers (Shallow Thoughts)

ICE Detention Numbers

This image, from Indivisible, has been floating around social media. I saw it on a Mastodon post though curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their website anywhere.

But is it true? I wasn't going to share it until I knew that. So I investigated.

A few people on mastodon asked, and other people (not whoever posted the image for Indivisible) replied with two links: a Common Dreams article about ICE planning to buy/rent lots more warehouses for more detention centers, and an MSN article about the history of concentration camps. Neither article addresses the "first six years" claim at all. The MSN link says that Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps in his first year (that turns out to be way off according to Wikipedia; I'll address that later).

The first question: how many people is ICE currently holding?

The American Immigration Council said it was 73,000 on Jan 23.
Vera.org has a nice graph peaking a little over 70,000, plus a map of detention facilities.
TRAC Reports says the current number is 60,311 (on April 10).
But I don't know anything about any of those organizations.

I hoped to find something from an organization I know and trust, but didn't. I checked Pro Publica first, but they've concentrated only on detained children (Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids) and then, only two months later, More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates.

The ACLU said in April that ICE plans to increase detention capacity to 96,600 people and that "more than 40" people have died in ICE detention, but they don't list a current number of detainees.

FactCheck.org gave the number at just under 60,000 in January, citing Enforcement Detention Management Statistics without giving a link for that.

ICE's Website

ICE's own website says 1,141,047 people have been detained (from when to when? no idea), peaking in 2022 at 300,000 (under Biden), with 66886 detained so far in FY2025 (they don't show any data for 2026, and maybe not for the end of 2025, though they claim it's updated quarterly and other sources say they released numbers in April, which I haven't found), Nothing about how many are detained at any given time, or how long any of those people was detained, so whatever these numbers are, they seem to be answering a different question even if they're truthful. I don't see a way to get other data; "Additional Resources" at the bottom of the page ends with FY2024.

But I eventually found the link on that website: "To download the underlying ICE data from all the dashboards as an Excel spreadsheet, click here."

That page has an Excel spreadsheet you can download. The "Facilities FY26" sheet seems to be the useful one, so I saved just that sheet as a CSV file.

It's a list of ICE facilities but it "does not include HOLD, HOSPITAL, JUVENILE, MIRP, or ORR facilities." So the total number is definitely larger than what's reported here, but we have no idea how much larger.

Numbers are broken down by Level (A - D), whatever that means; "Crim" vs "non-Crim" and male vs female; and "ICE Threat Level" (1 - 3 plus "No ICE Threat Level"). I took sums all three ways using a simple Python program (because I'm not enough of a spreadsheet person to know how to do it in gnumeric or LibreOffice Calc):

bylevel = 0
bycrim = 0
bythreat = 0

with open('FY26_detentionStats_04092026.csv') as csvfp:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvfp)
    for row in reader:
        # Each row is an OrderedDict
        bylevel += float(row['Level A'])
        bylevel += float(row['Level B'])
        bylevel += float(row['Level C'])
        bylevel += float(row['Level D'])

        bycrim += float(row['Male Crim'])
        bycrim += float(row['Male Non-Crim'])
        bycrim += float(row['Female Crim'])
        bycrim += float(row['Female Non-Crim'])

        bythreat += float(row['ICE Threat Level 1'])
        bythreat += float(row['ICE Threat Level 2'])
        bythreat += float(row['ICE Threat Level 3'])
        bythreat += float(row['No ICE Threat Level'])

print("Total by Level:", bylevel)
print("Total by Criminal status:", bylevel)
print("Total by Threat Level:", bylevel)

All three sums are 66161.70491200006.

I have no idea why the numbers aren't integers; maybe it's an average over the quarter?

Anyway, the various claims of over 70,000 are believable, since ICE's own numbers say it 's over 66,000 and that excludes a whole bunch of facility types.

The Nazi Comparison

Okay, so what about that "Hitler's First Six Years" claim?

Wikipedia has a graph: Number of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp system (linked off the article on Nazi concentration camps). The number stayed below 53,000 from 1935 to the end of 1940, but was up to 110,000 by September 1942 (no numbers in between).

So it looks like Indivisible's six-year claim is correct — in fact, they could increase it to seven years — since Hitler came to power in 1933.