Immigration Insight

The new report explains how the Trump administration is using a longstanding loophole to circumvent sanctuary policies and obscure the full scale of its immigration actions.

July 30, 2025

This morning, the Prison Policy Initiative released Hiding in Plain Sight, a report revealing the crucial role that locally-run jails are playing in President Trump’s program of mass deportation — and why states and counties must do more to end cooperation. Building on the organization’s work explaining how county jails enable state and federal incarceration, this report breaks down the complicated overlap between local criminal justice and immigration, and offers detailed data tables showing the level of involvement in every state and in specific jails.

Key findings include:

• The Trump administration is circumventing city and county sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. It accomplishes this through a longstanding loophole: ICE and other federal agencies can refer people for federal prosecution on immigration-related “crimes” and thus use local jails’ contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service in sanctuary cities, counties, and states. In doing so, the Trump administration is transforming what are normally civil immigration matters into more serious federal crimes.
• ICE data doesn’t show the full scale of immigrant detention in the U.S. While ICE detention data recorded 57,200 people on average in June 2025, the true count of people detained shows the overall crimmigration system is 45% larger, at around 83,400 people. That’s because ICE data does not account for people facing criminal immigration charges (as explained above), nor does it account for people held on ICE detainers, in some state detention facilities, or in overnight hold rooms.
• Jails and police departments play a key role in criminalizing immigration by detaining people until ICE agents can make an arrest. ICE has capitalized on local detention of immigrants — often on minor charges or charges that would not lead to jail time for U.S. citizens (such as driving without a license) — to not only make more arrests, but to enhance the appearance of targeting “criminals.” Arrests in jails comprise 45% of ICE arrests since Trump’s inauguration in January.

“Many cities and states have tried to offer sanctuary for immigrants by refusing to rent jail space to ICE and opting out of the 287(g) program, but it is not enough,” said report author Jacob Kang-Brown. “The Trump administration is leveraging jails at a new scale, using local contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and existing policing practices in order to expand detention.”

For reporters who want to dig deeper into these trends in their own counties and states, the report includes data tables showing:

• How many people are being held for ICE and the U.S. Marshals in over 600 local jails (and over 150 other facilities), the change in these populations from January to April 2025, and the share of all detained immigrants in every state being held by jails.
• The rate of ICE arrests happening in jails, compared to other locations, in every state.
• The number of immigrants arrested by the U.S. Marshals on various charge types over time — showing that a quickly-growing share of these people are being booked on charges related to their immigration status.
• The per-diem payments by the U.S. Marshals to hundreds of local jails in exchange for housing immigrants and other federal pretrial detainees.

The report concludes by urging counties to end all of their collaborations with federal immigration detention agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service, which has contracts with nearly 1,000 jails nationwide. Via their jails, local governments are — intentionally or not — providing the infrastructure for a massive attack on immigrants. But by resisting cooperation with President Trump’s racist deportation machine, counties and states also have the power to contain it.

The full report is available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jails_immigration.html