U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to be severely undercounting the number of people it has in immigration detention.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a congressional oversight agency—published last week found that ICE’s data contained glaring mistakes, leading to a significant undercount of people in immigration detention. The GAO’s report also found inconsistencies between different ICE field offices regarding data collection practices, including recording of data from individuals identified as “vulnerable” populations.
The report’s findings support prior calls by the American Immigration Council and its partners for ICE to bolster its data collection to provide the public meaningful oversight over ICE’s activities.
The GAO noted that ICE does not report annual data on all detentions. ICE officers arrest individuals through different means before determining whether those arrested will be detained while their removal proceedings run their course.
ICE’s Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2023 states that the detained population at the end of that year was 36,845. This number, however, likely refers to the average daily population in ICE detention rather than the total number of people booked into ICE custody in that particular year. By contrast, the GAO report states that the total number of individuals that passed through ICE detention during the 2022 calendar year is closer to 280,000. ICE’s report makes a passing reference to the total number in its book-ins graphs for FY2022 – 2023.
Perhaps ICE’s biggest accounting error relates to how the agency counts individuals in ICE custody. The GAO found that the number of people in immigration detention that ICE reported between 2019 and 2022 failed to include individuals detained in temporary detention facilities, such as ICE facilities used for staging or transporting individuals along the border, or individuals arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) who are then transferred to ICE detention after the initial arrests.
During calendar year 2022, ICE did not count among its total detained population 203,350 individuals—or roughly 42% of people detained—because they initially were held in temporary ICE or CBP facilities. ICE says it did not count these individuals because it did not detain them for very long. However, the GAO investigation found that approximately 70% of individuals not counted in the tally were eventually detained by ICE for weeks, and in some instances, even years.
Some of the problems with the reporting stem from a lack of clear and consistent data keeping practices. In February 2021, the Biden administration issued a memorandum establishing new interim enforcement priorities for immigration officials to follow when taking enforcement actions against individuals. These directives also required ICE to maintain data on the agency’s enforcement actions, which led the agency to implement the Arrest Analysis Reporting Tool (AART).
ICE officers also used the AART to obtain supervisory approval when arresting individuals who were outside the specified enforcement priorities. As part of this process, the AART contained fields for officers to note whether certain individuals had mitigating factors in their cases, such as whether they were members of vulnerable populations or had strong family ties in the United States.
This data proved useful as the Council and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center analyzed the AART data and found that more than one-third of ICE’s enforcement actions were against individuals who did not meet the specified enforcement priorities.
When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a final memo in September 2021 clarifying the enforcement priorities, the memo did not include a data collection requirement. It is unclear whether ICE continued using the AART after September 2021. The GAO report found that officers from the same ICE field office could not agree on whether they needed to obtain supervisory approval to conduct an arrest outside the enumerated enforcement priorities, a process that would have been recorded in the AART.
Without a centralized database, information that could be vital to oversee ICE’s implementation of its arrest and detention authority is scattered throughout sources often not available to the public.
The type of data collected and reported by DHS is only useful if the public can access and understand it. This level of accessibility is critical to the public’s oversight over immigration agencies. Congress mandates that DHS issue fiscal year reports comparing yearly data, and while the agency is meeting this requirement, it does not describe how it calculates its numbers. This leads to the problems identified by the GAO’s report.
ICE must go beyond the GAO’s recommendations of counting individuals temporarily detained and explaining its methodology about how it arrives at the figures it reports on immigration detention. DHS also must provide clear guidelines to rank-and-file officers on the data they need to record during enforcement actions, not only detention. And DHS must publish its own data in accessible forms or make it available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. These measures could go a long way toward the public having a better view of the true scope of immigration enforcement in our nation.
FILED UNDER: Immigration and Customs Enforcement
