On July 20, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new detention data for the first time in more than three months, showing 65,765 people held in immigration custody. But where are people actually being held and which detention centers are opening or growing and which ones are shrinking or closing? Detention Reports was created to help answer that question.
Adam Sawyer, the Director of Research at Relevant Research, joined me to talk about why he and the team built Detention Reports, a look under the hood at how the analysis works, and a tour of the new features on the site. Detention Reports maps every major facility and lets you filter by state, city, owner, and operator, with a chart on each facility page that shows its population over time and the role it plays in the system, from county jails that hold few people for short stays to the mega detention centers that hold many for months.
The newest additions are our own research on who owns and operates each facility and how it is classified. California City is the clearest case, a facility CoreCivic sold to the Department of Homeland Security after California passed a law letting state officials inspect it, so it is now federally owned and privately operated. Interval ADP also catches facilities that open or expand mid-year faster than the official average can, and at California City the difference is concrete, roughly 1,650 people against the 1,426 ICE reports. Every facility page carries a stable URL built on the official facility code, so a citation made today still resolves months from now.
Since 2018, Congress required ICE to publish detention data every two weeks, a bipartisan provision that the latest party-line appropriations removed, so the July release arrived with no clear legal mandate behind it and after a gap of more than ninety days. Even so, this is a data-rich moment for immigration research by historical standards, and the work that makes it usable, documented methods, stable links, and transparent decisions, is what separates a citable source from a dashboard that may vanish in six months.
Our work is nonpartisan by design. The data is the data, and the July 9 snapshot already understates the surge in arrests during the first days of the month, which is one more reason to read any single number as a point in time. We will update the site whenever ICE publishes next, whether that is in two weeks or another three months, and our full methodology is at relevant-research.com.
Watch the full conversation above. If you’re a journalist or researcher with questions, feedback, or corrections, email Adam at adam@relevant-research.com.
00:00 — Opening, and why tracking ICE detention is difficult
03:22 — The gap between ICE’s numbers and local reporting, and the two-week data mandate
06:05 — Why the fiscal-year average distorts the count, and how Interval ADP fixes it
08:18 — The three-month data gap and the law that ended ICE’s reporting mandate
11:04 — What the 65,765 snapshot captures and what it misses
13:16 — A tour of detentionreports.com
16:57 — Inside a facility report, Moshannon Valley and the roles facilities play
20:41 — Why owner and operator matter, and ICE buying California City
23:12 — How Interval ADP catches fast-growing facilities, from California City to Fort Bliss
26:01 — Building data people can cite, and fighting link rot
32:47 — Nonpartisan by design
34:48 — Deaths in detention, and immigrants in the emergency room
42:25 — What the July 9 data still misses, and how this differs from the Deportation Data Project
44:30 — The data moment we’re in, and how to help
Thank you Lidia Page, OhMySheesh, Rachel Cornelius, Caitlin Johnson, Greg Constantine, and many others for tuning into my live video with Adam Sawyer! Join me for my next live video in the app. And don’t forget to subscribe.
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