New United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data through mid-March 2026 provides a detailed look at immigration detention across the United States. Drawing on millions of detention history records spanning 17 years, Vera’s interactive ICE Detention Trends dashboard reveals an unprecedented level of detail about ICE detention populations—nationally and across the 1,490 facilities in which ICE has detained people—on each day from fiscal year 2009 through mid-fiscal year 2026 (October 1, 2008, through March 10, 2026). 

Ten Things Vera’s Dashboard Reveals about ICE Detention as of March 10, 2026

1. The daily immigration detention population reached a record high in mid-January 2026 of more than 73,400 people detained on a single day. There has been a substantial increase since the second Trump administration embarked on its mass detention and deportation agenda. As of mid-March 2026, detention populations have reached unprecedented levels, with populations on each day since mid-June 2025 exceeding the previous peak in August 2019.

2. In February 2026—the last full month that the data covers—ICE was detaining people in 456 facilities (excluding medical facilities) but acknowledged using just 220 facilities on its website. The agency has not published a new report since early February amid the recent U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown. Vera’s analysis reveals ICE was using 160 hold/staging facilities in February 2026—facility types that ICE largely excludes from the statistics it regularly puts out publicly.

3. In February 2026, ICE detained people in facilities across all 50 states as well as Guam, Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico.  The states with the most facilities in use were Texas (61 facilities), Florida (38 facilities), California (23 facilities), and Virginia (23 facilities). 

4. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has been increasingly using mega-detention facilities run by for-profit prison corporations with the capacity to detain large numbers of people, and the administration is discussing expanding capacity through the use of large warehouses to detain people. In March 2026, an average of more than 1,000 people were held in detention per day in 20 facilities across 11 states, 19 of which are operated by for-profit companies. These private companies have financially gained from the Trump administration’s expansion of detention, despite being fraught with reports of inhumane conditions, overcrowding, and lack of access to counsel. Two of these mega-facilities—Adams County Detention Center (Natchez, Mississippi) and Stewart Detention Center (Lumpkin, Georgia)—exceeded 2,000 people detained daily.

5. ICE detained between 1,300 and 1,800 people each day from November 2025 to mid-March 2026 in the highly controversial Florida Soft-Sided Facility-South, colloquially known as “Alligator Alcatraz”—a mega-facility with documented human rights abuses. Following the opening of the facility in July 2025, the facility had already reached daily population levels of nearly 1,500 people by August. The number of people detained there dropped briefly in late August and early September, when a federal judge ordered the closure of the facility, but rapidly increased again after an appellate panel put that order on hold. Since then, ICE has continued to detain people there in high numbers.

6. During ICE’s “Midway Blitz” operation in the Chicagoland area, between 100 and 300 people were detained nearly every day at the Broadview Service Staging facility in Illinois between mid-September and early November 2025, a facility through which people are generally booked in and quickly transferred to other detention facilities. The daily population reached a high of 326 people detained on November 1, 2025. The use of this facility was temporarily halted in early November by a federal judge to require federal authorities to improve sanitary conditions there. 

7. The number of people in detention has increased dramatically since the start of President Trump’s second term. Since his term began, ICE has booked people into detention roughly 444,900 times. The number of detention book-ins in the first two and a half months of 2026 was 61 percent higher than the same period last year.

8. In the most recent data DHS released, the agency excluded records of people in ICE detention held in medical facilities. Over the past 17 years, ICE has held people in at least 277 medical facilities. 

9. ICE has opened 152 new detention facilities during the second Trump administration across 39 states, 13 of which were opened in 2026. Among the facilities opened this year is Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma, which has already reached a capacity of more than 730 people detained on a single day.

10. ICE reopened 170 facilities that it had not been using in the year prior to President Trump’s second inauguration, including 69 non-dedicated facilities and 46 federal facilities.