Immigrant detentions soar 50% to a record under Trump

The number of people in immigration detention has soared by more than 50% since President Trump took office — and that doesn't include thousands more detainees who aren't in the administration's official count, an Axios review finds.Why it matters: A record 60,000 immigrants are now officially in long-term detention, according to the latest government data, a historic jump from the 39,000 or so who were behind bars at the end of the Biden administration.The catch: The Department of Homeland Security's tally doesn't include detainees in new facilities such as those in Florida's now-infamous "Alligator Alcatraz," spaces designated as short-term "holding rooms," and military bases.The numbers continue to balloon as Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown escalates in cities nationwide and DHS inks more deals to detain immigrants ahead of trying to deport them. By the numbers: The 60,000 immigrants now in detention top previous peaks set this year and in 2019, during Trump's first term, data through Aug. 10 show.The previous record was in June, when the average daily population in detention was 57,861 immigrants, according to immigration data collected by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).Before that, the record reported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS, was 55,654 in August 2019.The official counts don't tell the whole story, however."It's evident that the numbers being published by ICE about people held in long-term residential facilities is severely undercounting the number of people who are in ICE custody at any given moment," said Amelia Dagen, a staff attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.Zoom out: Most of the immigrants held at the state-run "Alligator Alcatraz" in Ochopee, Fla., don't appear in ICE's detention documents, which are updated roughly bimonthly for congressional oversight. About 700 people were there after it opened in July, according to news reports.A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Everglades facility no longer could accept migrants and should close. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Fox News he plans to appeal the decision, which followed activists' claims that the facility's environmental impacts weren't studied properly.DHS is charging forward with plans for more state-run facilities nationwide.Military bases also are being used to detain immigrants as the administration pushes for more bed space. Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, for example, has announced that it soon will take custody of 1,000 migrants. Detainees held at Bliss and other military installations also aren't included in DHS's detention records.Acting ICE director Todd Lyons told Congress in May that Fort Bliss was holding 69 people then. A Defense Department official referred questions about detainee numbers to DHS, but said the department is providing "support" for temporary detention space at Fort Bliss and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The official said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved facilities in Indiana and New Jersey that aren't open yet.Hundreds more migrants are being detained in "temporary" hold rooms in field offices, local and federal buildings across the country for days or weeks at a time. They're also excluded from the detention count. An analysis of detention populations by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) estimated that 650 detainees were in such holding units in May.An Axios review of government data from the Deportation Data Project found a rising number of people booked into holding rooms with increasingly long stays in June, when arrests surged nationally. Such immigrants often are listed as "in transit" in the detention system, and aren't counted in the daily population because they haven't been assigned to a specific facility. What they're saying: "Not having accurate and timely information from the ICE detainee locator makes it incredibly difficult for families and advocates and legal counsel to be able to locate and communicate with people who are detained," said Eunice Cho, who is handling several lawsuits challenging facility conditions for the ACLU."That incommunicado detention, of course, is not something that is allowed under the Constitution," she added.Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center, calls the facilities not included in the detainee counts "black sites" — a reference to the CIA-run prisons where suspects were interrogated, and often tortured, during the "war on terror." He believes restrictions on access to lawyers at these sites are deliberate."The real bottlenecks are the courts," Lukens said. "By removing someone's ability to have access to counsel you remove that bottleneck, and it's so much quicker so that you can arrest more people, get them in detention, get them out of the country."ICE spokesperson Emily Covington said ICE "includes all bed locations in its total detained population," including those run by other government agencies. "Alligator Alcatraz" is not an ICE facility so it's not included in the detainee count, she said, though it holds ICE's detainees.What to watch: Detention numbers and new spaces will continue expanding with DHS's financial windfall from Trump's "big beautiful bill." Private prison contractors CoreCivic and the Geo Group forecast more business with ICE in their latest quarterly disclosures. Indiana, Nebraska and Louisiana are the latest states to announce plans for their own "Alligator Alcatraz"-type facilities."The Trump administration has shown that it is willing to pull out basically all the stops to increase the detention and deportation of undocumented people," PPI's Wanda Bertram said.Go deeper: ICE arrests decline amid backlash to June immigration raidsIllegal border crossings hit decades low under Trump crackdown

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