Rounded up and detained in facilities largely in the South, a map of where tens of thousands are being held in states across the U.S. paints a striking picture of the vast Trump administration’s hardline immigration crackdown.
With Immigration Customs and Enforcement detention facilities at capacity, The Independent’s map shines a light on where 43,759 people are being held in the centers across the country as of February 8 — and more than half do not hold criminal records, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Many will have to wait in the facilities for weeks and, in some cases, months before their cases proceed.
Detention centers in Texas and Louisiana have by far the most number of people overall, with one Mississippi center — privately-run Adams County Detention Center in Natchez — holding over 2,100 detainees on average, according to the data.
Border states have detained the most people for years but under the first Trump administration, experts noted a shift to facilities in other southern states, reflected in the most current data.
Texas has detained the most, with 12,259 being held in ICE detention centers across the state on average. Eight facilities in Texas out of the top 20 nationwide were each holding more than 800 people for ICE, according to the data.
The Lone Star state was followed by 6,878 in Louisiana, 3,024 in California, 2,382 in Georgia, 2,300 in Arizona and 2,169 in Mississippi.
After Mississippi’s Adams County center, run by private prison company CoreCivic, the facility with the second largest population was the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, averaging 1,680 detainees.
There are also more than 188,000 families and individuals in the system who are in the Alternatives to Detention programs of January 11, meaning they are being monitored via ankle monitoring, home visits and checks in at ICE offices.
But the ICE figures “only scratch the surface” in Texas because of the number of migrants also in Customs and Border Protection detention and the state’s Operation Lone Star program, explained Daniel Hatoum, senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Beyond Borders program.
Hatoum described Operation Lone Star, the border security initiative launched by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, as the state’s attempt to carry out immigration enforcement via a constitutional loophole.
“They charge folks with things like trespassing, specifically trying to target immigrants with state-level criminal violations, and so you have a lot of detention coming from that as well,” he told The Independent.
President Donald Trump has the mandate to go after migrants without criminal records after rescinding several Biden administration limitations on ICE arrests.
Among the thousands in lock up, nearly 55 percent have no criminal record, the data shows.
“Often in some of these facilities, they hold people who have been convicted of crimes alongside people who are there simply because of their immigration case,” said Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provides legal services for people detained throughout the Midwest.
While the White House has declared all undocumented migrants “criminals,” there is no law that makes it a crime to live in the U.S. as an undocumented migrant and it is treated as a civil violation by the courts.
“Given that immigration detention is civil in nature, it really doesn't have anything to do with anybody's past infractions,” Franzblau told The Independent.
The reason for the concentration of detention facilities in the South is down to a number of states phasing out immigration centers. With that comes a myriad of challenges for the people being held.
“A lot of these facilities are far from cities and that makes it difficult for access to legal counsel and for people to able to be in communication with family members,” Franzblau said.
“It raises a lot of issues with these facilities being placed in remote regions in this way,” he said. “They are concentrated in the South and in states where you have a particularly strong influence from private prison contractors,” the analyst added.
Immigration advocacy groups have long warned about the conditions inside detention facilities where people face “egregious abuses.”
While these abuses - such as holding detainees in solitary confinement and depriving them of medication - were also prevalent in previous administrations, there are fears that things will deteriorate more rapidly inside facilities under Trump.
“ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in the agency’s custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to The Independent. “ICE continues to review its immigration detention centers nationally, monitoring the quality of life and treatment of detained individuals among other factors relevant to the continued operation of each facility.”
ICE under the Trump administration is only just getting started. Its network of detention centers in county jails and for-profit prisons had around 38,000 beds at the beginning of February, according to internal Department of Homeland Security data. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, wants 100,000 detention beds.
The ICE spokesperson told The Independent that its “significant number of arrests” do require greater detention capacity.
ICE is reopening an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, it was announced Thursday, after securing a $1.2 billion contract lasting 15 years with private prison company The Geo Group.
The Delaney Hall facility in Newark will have 1,000 beds, making it the largest in the New York metropolitan area.
It’s a sign of what’s to come, campaigners said.
“What we're seeing now is something like over 110 percent capacity in ICE detention,” Hatoum said. “When you have overcapacity in detention, in prison, anything like that, conditions worsen.”
“The Trump administration wants to detain more folks,” Hatoum warned. “Homan has called for things like ‘tent cities’ and so the concern is that we're trying to build potential tools quick, without the resources...and the conditions are going to be so terrible that people are harmed.”
