Vera Institute Releases Report on ICE Detention Trends

Every year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subjects hundreds of thousands of people to civil immigration detention—a practice that is unjust, inhumane, and completely unnecessary. It does so under a veil of secrecy, sharing only limited, often error-prone statistics with the public.  

This week, Vera Institute updated its ICE Detention Trends dashboard with new data through early August 2026, presenting Vera’s analysis of millions of detention history records over nearly an 18-year period. This interactive data tool reveals an unprecedented level of detail about ICE detention populations—nationally and across the 1,438 facilities in which ICE has detained people—on each day of the nearly 18-year period covering fiscal year 2009 through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026. 

Additionally, Vera published a report detailing 10 key takeaways from its analysis of the most recently available ICE detention data through August 5, 2026—obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and shared last week by the Deportation  Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley.