President Donald Trump’s deputies have detained a record 60,000 illegal migrants, according to ICE data revealed by the New York Times.
The detention record reflects the all-in deportation push by Trump’s many deputies, departments, agencies, and offices.
In January, only 39,000 migrants were in detention, many of whom were recent border crossers. In June 2023, just 30,000 migrants were being detained by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration administration.
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Trump’s number will likely grow as more detention centers are opened and expanded, for example, in Fort Bliss, Texas. The administration plans to have 100,000 beds for migrant detention as they repatriate millions of illegal economic migrants.
The detention centers are needed to hold illegal migrants while officials go through the time-consuming process of winning approval from immigration judges and home-country border officials.
Amid Trump’s accelerated ICE deportations and the rising number of self-deportations, Americans are seeing pocketbook benefits for American families — higher wages, more benefits, more jobs, and greater workplace productivity.
Work progresses on a new migrant detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility in the Florida Everglades, Friday, July 4, 2025, in Ochopee, Florida. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
The New York Times made sure to include denunciations from pro-migration advocates:
“The Trump administration is building an unprecedented detention system of extraordinary size and cruelty to terrorize immigrant communities,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said that detention had grown rapidly under Mr. Trump compared with past administrations.
“Compared to past administrations’ records, this detention level is much, much higher — almost twice as many noncitizens are being detained now as were under President Obama,” she said.
“The immigration system is so convoluted and mismanaged that few people believe that immigration can possibly help the country thrive,” admitted pro-migration researcher Alexander Kustov. “No democracy has ever managed to ease widespread immigration concerns without being very selective about whom to admit,” he wrote in the August issue of Foreign Affairs.