Ask an Analyst: Searching for data on ICE
Go behind the scenes with our team as we find and make sense of the numbers.
One month into 2026, ICE has been all over my news landscape. The Trump administration has expanded its immigration enforcement activity, and the federal presence in cities across the country has topped headlines and sparked nationwide protests.
Naturally, at USAFacts, we turn to the data to wrap our heads around big topics, and I’d like to invite you in on that head-wrapping. ICE says it’s staffed up by 120% during Trump’s second term. How has the agency’s activity ramped up over that time, and what does it look like today? That’s a big question, so let’s start by looking for a single metric: ICE deportations. It’s a good place to start, but we’ll also keep our eyes out for other data about arrests or the detained population that would help us piece together an answer.
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Now then, let’s get into it.
A logical starting place: ICE.gov/statistics
Wait, ICE.gov/statistics? Well, this should be easy, right? The agency has its own statistics page, chock-full of user-friendly dashboards on arrests, detentions, deportations, and more. A government data gold mine!
The issue: this data has historically updated quarterly with a one quarter lag, but that hasn’t happened for a while. The latest data available here is from December 2024 — a few weeks before Trump was re-inaugurated and tapped now-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to lead the administration’s immigration initiatives.
This is frustrating. There’s no mention on the page of why it’s stuck in 2024 and it still indicates that we can expect a quarterly update. Delays in government releases happen for various reasons, but it’s hard to know what’s happening here.
Sure, there’s plenty to learn from long-term immigration enforcement trends, but how much does 2024 data tell us about what’s happening right now? To understand the current moment, there’s not much we can use here. Onward.
Our favorite stop for immigration stats: OHSS
So, the “agency-provides-the-data-on-their-stats-page" route wasn’t much help. My next stop is the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) which pulls together data from the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that oversee different parts of the immigration apparatus. I’m oversimplifying, but I like to think that OHSS provides a relatively complete picture of immigration in the US by compiling enforcement data from both the border (the domain of Customs and Border Protection) and the interior (that’s ICE) as well as from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which looks after authorized immigration.
There are so many reports and data tables available from OHSS. Many update annually or quarterly, some don’t seem to update consistently but have data and analysis you can’t find elsewhere, and one precious report — Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes — publishes monthly.
At least, that’s what the page advertises.
Darn.
This report had published monthly for 13 consecutive months starting in January 2024, but that ended with the January 2025 release of November 2024 data.
So, I’m checking again, hoping that this time we’ll see an updated look at arrests and removals (a.k.a. deportations) by ICE, or at least more information about the review and when it might be completed.
Double darn.
This is the 61st time I’ve visited this URL in the last six months on my primary browser.
My search for contemporaneous ICE data continues.
Back to basics: starting over with ICE
It’s time to reach deep into the bag of tricks I’ve learned in two years as a senior data analyst on our research team. It’s brilliant, I can’t believe I hadn’t done this earlier:
Screenshot for effect. I typically use “site:.gov KEYWORDS” to limit results to .gov URLs. Give it a try!
First result gives me ice.gov/statistics, which we’ve already explored. Second is ice.com (a private entity; how many extra clicks must they pick up from government-curious web searchers ...), and third is a NOAA-funded program on snow and ice data (bookmarking for later, I love exploring a new-to-me government data source). Fourth is a part of the second result (the wrong ICE) and fifth is another Immigration and Customs Enforcement link:
But what is it?
Hmmm. The URL doesn’t mention statistics at all, but there is a link to this page that hides at the bottom of ice.gov/statistics, and the snippet does mention custody data. That’s potentially interesting: how many people does ICE have in custody at a given time? That’s not data that either of the two other sources offers.
We’re looking for metrics that are a.) up to date and b.) useful for developing a numbers-based approach to understanding current ICE activity and its historical context. When I first open the page I see ... none of this. It appears to be a list of policies and standards documentation that govern ICE detention facilities. However, after scrolling past five headers, eight hyperlinks, and hundreds of words, we find the sixth header: “Detention Statistics.”
It appears to have annual reports by fiscal year starting in 2019, including data for the current FY2026 which we're nearly one-third of the way through. And what do I spy in the very bottom corner?
“Updated 1/8/2026.” PROMISING.
So, while it’s unclear what exactly was updated (someone could have corrected a typo, for instance), having a fiscal year-to-date file for 2026 suggests that we may have found a current source for at least some ICE data, focused on custody and detention.
We’ve got 10 tabs in the file:
- Header
- ATD FY26 YTD
- Detention FY26
- ICLOS and Detainees
- Semiannual
- Monthly Bond Statistics
- Facilities FY26
- FY26 Monthly Segregation
- Vulnerable and Special Population
- Footnotes
“Footnotes” has definitions, program details, and acronyms. It feels crowded, so CTRL+F will be my friend, but I’m grateful that it looks thorough.
Over on the “Header” tab, we see that the 2020 DHS appropriations bill requires these statistics to be shared with the public, presumably in a timely way. Thanks, people who passed this bill!
There looks to be a lot of information here, but do we have the detention data that was promised? Yes, but it’s in two different tabs (“Detention FY26” and “ICLOS and Detainees”), the numbers are different, and it’s not immediately clear why that is. After digging into the footnotes, I see that one tab provides two data points per month starting in January 2023 — a detainee headcount for the 15th and for the last day of the month — and the other tab provides a current snapshot of the detained population on the day the database was queried by the team compiling the report. So, the difference might be fully explained by the numbers being generated at different times (flagging this to study later).
What else is here? For starters, one big, welcome surprise on the “Detention FY26” tab:
Look at that — removals data on a detention page.
That’s removals data, which I haven’t seen updated since January 2025! Why it’s on a page ostensibly about custody when people who have been deported are by definition not in US custody is beyond me, but here we are.
And on the same tab, there’s ICE book-ins! I’ve seen some media sources use these as a proxy for ICE arrests, but they’re inclusive of people arrested by other agencies (like Customs and Border Protection) and transferred to ICE custody. That means the number is always higher than the administrative arrests made by the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE of people in violation of civil immigration law, which are the arrests making the news. There doesn’t seem to be a way to isolate these specific arrests in this dataset, so that’s frustrating.
There’s also information about:
- Average daily population and average length of stay
- Various crosstabs for different populations
- Details on ICE facilities
- Alternatives to detention and their use and efficacy for those on the ICE docket but who are not in custody
Intriguingly, the “Semiannual” tab details arrests, book-ins, and removals of people in the US armed forces, of US citizens, of the parents of US citizens, and of people with Temporary Protected Status. While it appears like we have data through FY 2025, a quick look shows that all rows for that year are zeroed out, save for the book-ins of parents of US citizens. What’s going on here?
Looks like a true zero but probably isn’t, need to confirm.
The whole data file is released every two weeks, but this “Semiannual” tab presumably only updates twice each year (per the note on the sheet, the next update is set for 3/31/2026, the last day of Q2 of the federal fiscal year). The semiannual cadence suggests one other update in a 12-month period, which puts the last one on or around 9/30/2025, or the last day of FY 2025 (the end of Q4). I wouldn’t expect to see finalized data for a fiscal year publish on the last day of that same fiscal year, so I suspect the FY 2025 rows do not show true zeros, and that we can expect to see real data come March.
The footnotes tab seems to confirm this, noting that data through FY 2024 is “historical” and “static.” Since FY 2025 isn’t mentioned, I infer that it is still subject to change. And indeed it has changed. Adding to the uncertainty, we can see that the FY 2025 file does in fact have FY 2025 data on the “Semiannual” tab, but it has been zeroed out in the FY 2026 release.
We don’t publish based on speculation at USAFacts, so I’d work to confirm this hypothesis before publishing anything that treated these zeros as anything more than placeholders for incomplete data.
So there we have it
After a bit of a journey, we’ve landed somewhere that is quite satisfying from a data perspective — we have the removal statistic we were searching for, plus detention and book-in data (albeit not one-to-one with arrests) up to as recent as a few weeks ago, and a handful of other data morsels to chew on.
Here’s where we’re at with ICE removals:
ICE is on pace to deport about 470,000 people by the end of FY 2026 — that’s 48% more than in FY 2025.
Removals by fiscal year
Altogether, this is enough to get a much more up-to-date understanding of ICE activity than we had when we started, and to share that with our audience.
The facts aren’t always so easy to come by — sometimes it takes some digging. Government data can be delayed or incomplete, limited in scope, or simply stuck in the hard-to-find nooks and crannies of the vast .gov domain.
The day the latest government data is available in an understandable format at each agency’s own statistics page, we’ll pack things up over here, retire, and start the passion project we’ve always wanted to (although, honestly, what we’re always dreaming about – and working towards – is government data getting better and faster).
Still, sometimes buried in the depths of the proverbial zip file is a gem of a dataset (even a single cell!) that could help us understand the human stories happening in communities across the country.
