The Tucson Sentinel reports that ICE is managing a little-known detention facility at the Phoenix-Mesa Gatway Airport which holds 157 detainees. The AROCC (Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center) is conveniently located to deportation flights. The Deportation Data Project continues to request government data with an on-going Freedom of Information Act request.
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This is Austin Kocker and Adam Sawyer’s blog post which is a good way to learn more about immigration detention centers. He reports that immigraton detention centers are reporting a recond number of 61,226 detainees. (This may be undercounted because of local holding facilities of various kinds.)
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This article describes a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census which shows that between January and July, 2025, 1.2 million foreign born workers (authorized and unauthorized) left the labor force. This was the result of detentions, deportations, and “work “no shows” due to fear of detention/deportation and no new incoming labor.
Unauthorized immigrants comprise portions of our labor sectors as follows:
- Construction – 13%
- Agriculture (crop farmworkers) – 42%
- Agriculture (all) – 25%
- Leisure/Hospitality – 7%
- Domestic Cleaners – 25%
The report provided shows an impact to prices in fruits and vegetables.
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This policy alert from USCIS (August 19, 2025) clarifies that discretion that can be used to deny US immigration status changes (for example a green card holder who is applying to become a US citizen) if the individual has “support(ed) or promote(d) anti-American ideologies or activities.”
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ICE is asking detainees to sign a stipulation (document) which says they agree to be deported without a judicial hearing. The National Immigration Project provides an ICE Stipulation Explainer which includes this information in both English and Spanish:
- Sample ICE stipulation (document pre-prepared for signature)
- Annotations to explain what the document means.
- Explanation of legal process to reverse the effect of the signature, if possible
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Third-country deportees have already been sent to South Sudan and Eswatini and Rwanda may take up to 250 deportees from third-countries who refuse to take them back.
Matsapha Correctional Facility in Eswatini
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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
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WASHINGTON – Today, the Justice Department published a list of states, cities, and counties identified as having policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.
“Sanctuary policies impede law enforcement and put American citizens at risk by design,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “The Department of Justice will continue bringing litigation against sanctuary jurisdictions and work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to eradicate these harmful policies around the country.”
On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14287: Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens. The Executive Order recognized that “some State and local officials . . . continue to use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws” and “[i]t is imperative that the Federal Government restore the enforcement of United States law.” The Executive Order directed the Justice Department, in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, to publish a list of such jurisdictions. Accordingly, the following states, cities, and counties have been identified as sanctuary jurisdictions:
STATES:
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Illinois
- Minnesota
- Nevada
- New York
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- Vermont
- Washington
COUNTIES:
- Baltimore County, MD
- Cook County, IL
- San Diego County, CA
- San Francisco County, CA
CITIES:
- Albuquerque, NM
- Berkeley, CA
- Boston, MA
- Chicago, IL
- Denver, CO
- East Lansing, MI
- Hoboken, NJ
- Jersey City, NJ
- Los Angeles, CA
- New Orleans, LA
- New York City, NY
- Newark, NJ
- Paterson, NJ
- Philadelphia, PA
- Portland, OR
- Rochester, NY
- Seattle, WA
- San Francisco City, CA
In recent months, the Justice Department has filed several lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions seeking to compel compliance with federal law, including one against New York City on July 24th. Recently, the Mayor of Louisville agreed to revoke their sanctuary policies following a letter from the Justice Department threatening legal action.
Read more about the sanctuary jurisdiction list and the criteria for inclusion here. This list is not exhaustive and will be updated as federal authorities gather further information. The federal government will assist any jurisdiction that desires to be taken off this list to identify and eliminate their sanctuary policies, so they no longer stand in opposition to federal immigration enforcement.
Immigration Insight 