The Project

About this project:

Immigration detention in the United States is vast, complex, and often difficult to understand. ICE publishes detailed statistics, but those numbers are frequently buried in spreadsheets with little context. This project aims to make those figures easier to interpret and explore whether you’re a researcher, journalist, policymaker, advocate, or curious member of the public.

What’s Included

The main dashboard presents:

• The number of people detained by ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) each month
• Criminality classifications (e.g., convicted, pending charges, non-criminal)
• Facility-level data, including population breakdowns and average length of stay
• Geographic trends and comparisons by state where possible

All visualizations are updated using ICE’s biweekly dataset, which is available on ice.gov.

Data Preparation

All data used on this site is:

• Publicly available
• Cleaned and organized to enhance readability
• Not altered beyond formatting, standardization, and restructuring

The source files come directly from ICE’s Detention Management reporting. The visualizations do not change or reinterpret the numbers — they only display them in an accessible format.

Disclaimer

As stated on the entry page, DetentionStats.com is not affiliated with or endorsed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or any government agency. This project was developed independently for educational and public interest purposes.