U.S. Immigrant Detention Grows to Record Heights under Trump Administration
The number of unauthorized immigrants and other noncitizens placed into immigration detention has grown to the highest level in history in the first ten months of President Donald Trump’s second term. It could nearly double in months to come, with the budget for immigrant detention growing by $45 billion over the next three years—at least approximately $14 billion per year—under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted in July. This represents a threefold increase over the $3.9 billion detention budget that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received for fiscal year (FY) 2025, turbocharging what already stood as the world’s largest immigrant detention system. It also means that the annual budget for immigration detention is now on pace to be 62 percent larger than that of the entire federal prison system, which was $8.6 billion in FY 2025.
