How Has ICE’s Detention Network Expanded Under the Trump Administration?
In July 2025, Congress appropriated $45 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for “single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity.” Public attention so far has focused on the Administration’s attempts to build “mega-center” deportation hubs, which included building “soft-sided” detention centers on military bases in 2025 and purchasing 11 industrial warehouses in early 2026.
But ICE’s own detention data tell a different story. ICE nearly doubled the size of its detention network before OBBA was signed into law, using Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSAs) to hold detainees in state and local jails. After its mega-center strategy stalled following OBBA’s enactment, ICE increased the capacity of its detention network by expanding existing detention agreements, forming new partnerships with state prisons, and reopening idle prisons owned by private prison contractors. ICE has subsequently bought several of these prisons outright.
These contractors are essential for ICE’s detention network. Across the three dates included in this analysis, 49% of ICE detainees were held in a facility run by private contractors operating under IGSAs. These agreements do not have to be competitively awarded and often include “guaranteed minimum” payments to ensure ICE can use a minimum number of beds whether or not they are filled. In fiscal year 2020, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found ICE paid $1.3 billion a year for 28,000 beds. This analysis shows that the Trump Administration increased the number of guaranteed minimum beds by 74%, from 27,488 to 47,773, from January 2025 to July 2026.
The following analysis uses ICE’s own detention facility data to illustrate how its detention network expanded under the Trump Administration and who operates its facilities.
Data and Methods
Since 2019, Congress has required ICE to publish snapshots of its detention facilities and detainee population once every two months.1 This analysis uses archived copies of these snapshots that show how ICE’s detention network changed from January 2025 through July 2026, the most recent available data. It is anchored on three key dates:
January 6, 2025: the last data published by the Biden Administration,
June 23, 2025: the last snapshot before OBBA’s appropriations, and
July 9, 2026: the most recently available data.
It is important to keep two aspects of these data in mind. First, the data only show facilities that are holding detainees on a specific date. Many of the facilities hold a small number of detainees, and if they are not holding any ICE detainees on a particular date, they are not included in the snapshot. Second, ICE does not report the number of detainees being held in a facility. Instead, it reports fiscal-year-to-date averages for each facility, which do not reflect the number of detainees being held in the facility on a particular date. These data also exclude detainees held in “hold rooms,” hospitals, juvenile facilities, and several other categories of facilities. These data also do not show how much ICE pays these facilities, but they do show how many “guaranteed minimum” beds ICE pays for – beds it has agreed to pay for whether or not they are filled. See the methodology at the end of this analysis for more information.
ICE’s Detention Network at the End of the Biden Administration
At the end of the Biden Administration, ICE was holding an average of 38,894 detainees at 107 facilities. 27% of the detainees were classified as “criminal.” ICE reported having guaranteed minimum agreements with 48 facilities for a total of 27,488 beds.
Eighty-two of these facilities were owned by state and local governments or private prison companies that ICE used under IGSA contracts. Fifty-one were direct agreements with ICE, and 31 were IGSAs with the U.S. Marshals Service where ICE was added as an “authorized agency user” to an IGSA between a local facility and the U.S. Marshals Service.2 Together, they held 64% of ICE detainees. The remaining detainees were held at federal facilities, which were a mixture of ICE “service processing centers,” “contract detention facilities,” “staging” locations, and federal prisons.3
The day-to-day operations of these facilities – both federal and state and local – are primarily handled by a handful of private prison companies, with the largest being the GEO Group, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), LaSalle Corrections, and Management and Training Corporation. In the January 6, 2025 snapshot, 84% of ICE’s detention population was held in facilities operated by these companies, and 61% were housed in a facility run by either the GEO Group or CoreCivic.
The Trump Administration’s Pre-OBBA Expansion
The Trump Administration rapidly expanded ICE’s detention network before the enactment of OBBA. By the end of June, the data show ICE detainees in 92 additional facilities. 67 of these operated through IGSAs, and 53 operated through IGSAs between county jails and the U.S. Marshals Service.
ICE’s reported detainee population increased by 21% between January 6 and June 23, from 38,894 to 47,236. Most of that increase, 64%, came from facilities ICE was already using in January, and the 92 additional facilities account for the remaining 36%. ICE also reported that 52 facilities had guaranteed minimum agreements for 30,130 beds, and the share of detainees labeled as “criminal” increased from 27% to 29%.
This increase is likely understated for two reasons. First, 24 of the 199 facilities reported no information about the number of detainees. Second, ICE reports each facility’s average number of detainees for the fiscal year, not a count on the day of the snapshot. If a facility held no one until April and 500 people from April through June, it would report an average of about 160 because the days with 500 detainees would be averaged across the days with no detainees. The average detainee statistic, by construction, changes more slowly than the actual detainee population.
The June data show ICE detainees being housed at federal facilities, including five federal prisons, two facilities located on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, and 26 other “service processing centers,” contract detention facilities, or “staging” detention centers that ICE either operates directly or subcontracts with a private detention company to operate.4
Although this initial expansion increased the number of detainees being held in what are nominally state and local government facilities, the majority of detainees (74%) were held in facilities operated by the four largest private prison contractors.
The Post-OBBA Expansion
The July 2026 snapshot shows a distinct change in ICE’s detention network. The average number of detainees increased by 32%, from 47,236 to 62,517, while the net number of facilities only increased by 5%. The share of “criminal” detainees declined by 26%, from 29% to 21%. And the number of facilities with guaranteed minimum payments increased from 52 to 67, and the number of guaranteed minimum beds increased from 30,130 to 47,773.
Fifteen percent of detainees were held in what I categorize as “Trump expansion” facilities: fifteen sites the Administration has built, bought, reopened, or expanded since taking office. ICE’s largest facility is now Camp East Montana, a soft-sided facility built on the Army base at Fort Bliss outside of El Paso, Texas, with an average detainee population of 2,026. Four are state prisons that were converted, in whole or in part, to house ICE detainees, and hold an average of 1,766 detainees. Four are private facilities that were reopened; three were facilities that agreed to accept a larger number of ICE detainees; and the remaining three were already operating CoreCivic facilities and a staging site in Puerto Rico.
It is also notable what is not in the data. None of the 11 industrial warehouses purchased in early 2026 have reported housing a single detainee. Another soft-sided facility built on a decommissioned airfield in the Florida Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” operated from June 2025 to June 2026 and reported an average detainee population of 1,383 in April 2026.
These data also do not show ICE’s most recent efforts to expand its detention network. These include purchasing four CoreCivic facilities for $2.2 billion, the reactivation of a GEO Group facility in Colorado, and a new solicitation that could award up to $10 billion to build or renovate detention space at up to eight of ICE’s current or former “service processing centers.” The initial awards will likely be announced at the end of September.
Oversight Risks and Next Steps
This analysis reveals several underappreciated aspects of ICE’s detention network. First, it shows that ICE nearly doubled the size of its detention network before OBBA passed, using IGSAs to place detainees in state and local facilities. After OBBA, the Trump Administration’s efforts to build a new nationwide detention network stalled, and growth came instead from idle prisons that private companies reopened for ICE – roughly half under new IGSAs and roughly half under ICE’s own contracts – and from state prisons that had never held ICE detainees.
These are not the patterns I expected to find. I had first assumed I would sort facilities into federal on one side and state and local on the other. But these categories break down under IGSAs. States and counties are signing agreements with ICE, but many of these facilities are run by the same set of private contractors ICE hires to run its own facilities. Over the three dates included in this analysis, 84% of ICE’s detainee population was held in facilities run by a private contractor, and 59% of those detainees were in facilities operating under an IGSA.
These agreements pose multiple risks to oversight. In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General found that ICE had never defined what an IGSA is and, up to that point, operated outside of federal procurement guidelines, including competitive bidding guidelines. Although ICE has subsequently published additional guidance for IGSAs, it has continued to assert that federal procurement regulations do not fully apply to them.5 In 2021, ICE officials told the GAO that the agency preferred using IGSAs because they had fewer requirements than standard procurement contracts.
These risks are now magnified by OBBA’s detention appropriations, which gave ICE an unprecedented amount of money with few of the oversight guardrails that Congress attaches to the agency’s annual appropriations. This analysis has shown that the Trump Administration has increased the number of guaranteed minimum beds by 74% since the end of the Biden Administration. The GAO last measured the costs of these agreements for fiscal year 2020 and found ICE paid $1.3 billion for 28,000 beds. Even at 2020’s per-bed rate, ICE would be paying over $2 billion a year for these guaranteed minimum beds – more than twice the cost of the 11 warehouses purchased earlier this year.
These data do not provide any additional information about ICE’s payments to specific facilities. I am currently working on matching the facilities identified in these data with ICE’s spending data from USAspending.gov to see if ICE’s appropriations can be traced to specific facilities and recipients. I will share this analysis soon.
Methodology
This analysis compares ICE's reported detention-facility rosters on January 6, 2025, June 23, 2025, and July 9, 2026. The underlying data are ICE’s facility data workbooks preserved by the Deportation Data Project. The dates in the analysis reflect the date ICE used for each data file, not the data’s publication or download date.
The sample contains 514 facility-date records representing 250 distinct facilities. Facility names and addresses were reviewed and made consistent across each of the three snapshots. Separately reported components of a detention complex remain separate if the facilities are physically distinct from each other and have separate addresses.
ICE only publishes information about a facility with at least one detainee on the specified date of each snapshot. A facility’s absence from a particular file does not establish that it closed or that ICE terminated its contract with the facility, or that it had not previously held detainees. The facility counts describe the reported network, not all the facilities ICE could use to detain individuals.
The analysis’s population measure is the aggregated total of each facility’s reported average daily population (ADP). ICE defines it as detainee-days divided by days in the reporting period, using midnight population counts. The facility figures are fiscal-year-to-date averages: the January and June 2025 snapshots are from FY2025, beginning October 1, 2024. The July 2026 snapshot is in FY2026, beginning October 1, 2025. Differences between these averages are not changes in the number of detainees per day.
The analysis sums the four ADP components labeled Level A through Level D when all four are reported. Entries with incomplete ADP remain in facility counts but are omitted from ADP totals and population shares. Coverage is complete for the 107 January 2025 and 208 July 2026 facilities. The June 2025 data only report ADP for 175 of the 199 facilities. Missing values are neither zero-filled nor estimated from another date. Calculations use unrounded values, with rounding for display.
The data also includes a “Guaranteed Minimum” column but do not explain the values in this column. The analysis assumes that these values represent the number of beds at the facility subject to the minimum requirement, as specified in the statutory reporting requirement under 8 U.S.C. §1378a(3)(L).
The analysis distinguishes between ICE's reported facility-type label and the entity operating the facility. An intergovernmental agreement does not establish state or local government ownership or management, and a facility’s reported type does not necessarily identify its operator.6 Operator assignments draw on government records, company disclosures, news reporting, and other verifiable public records. Where dated evidence is unavailable, some assignments are carried across the three dates under an assumption of stability. When an operator cannot be identified and the reported facility’s name includes the words “county” and “jail,” it was assumed to be operated by local law enforcement. Operator classifications applied to a map date do not establish the date an operator took control.
Each map entry is assigned a display category. Reviewed “Trump expansion facilities” take precedence, followed by service processing centers; remaining entries are grouped by operator or placed in “Other / unassigned.” For July 9, 2026, the expansion category includes new or converted sites, reopenings, ICE purchases, and identified contractual expansions. Earlier panels retain their previous expansion classifications.
The maps plot reviewed coordinates from the Deportation Data Project, Census Bureau Geocoder, and OpenStreetMap against Census 2025 generalized state boundaries. Missing ADP receives a small location marker. Overlapping markers may be shifted slightly for legibility. Facilities outside the contiguous United States remain in counts and totals and are identified beneath each map.
The population bar shows each display category’s share of available ADP. The separate contracting-type bar shows shares of listed facilities, including facilities with missing ADP.
Footnotes
These reporting requirements are codified at 8 U.S.C. §1378a. U.S. Congress, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, Division D, Section 218 (December 20, 2019) (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-116publ93/html/PLAW-116publ93.htm).↩︎
See box 18 of this IGSA between the Marshals Service and Albany County, New York.↩︎
Facility types describe contracting arrangements and do not consistently identify who owns the property or operates it. Service processing centers are ICE-owned, while contract detention facilities can be privately owned and operated under direct ICE contracts. Intergovernmental agreements involve state or local governments, but the facilities may be publicly or privately owned and may have private operators. A U.S. Marshals Service agreement allows ICE to use space through that agency’s existing arrangement. See the inspector general’s Table 1 and GAO’s Tables 1–2. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, ICE Does Not Fully Use Contracting Tools to Hold Detention Facility Contractors Accountable for Failing to Meet Performance Standards (January 29, 2019) (https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2019-02/OIG-19-18-Jan19.pdf); U.S. Government Accountability Office, Immigration Detention: Actions Needed to Improve Planning, Documentation, and Oversight of Detention Facility Contracts (January 13, 2021) (https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-149.pdf).↩︎
The June snapshot lists two separate detention facilities at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: “Migrant Ops Center Main A” and “JTF Camp Six.” ICE also identifies both facilities in its visitor and legal-access guidance. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (JTF Camp Six and Migrant Ops Center Main A) (https://www.ice.gov/detain/detention-facilities/naval-station-guantanamo-bay).↩︎
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, ICE Does Not Fully Use Contracting Tools to Hold Detention Facility Contractors Accountable for Failing to Meet Performance Standards, page 11 (January 29, 2019) (https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2019-02/OIG-19-18-Jan19.pdf).↩︎
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Immigration Detention: Actions Needed to Improve Planning, Documentation, and Oversight of Detention Facility Contracts (January 13, 2021) (https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-149.pdf).↩︎