When President Trump returned to office on a promise of a historic "mass deportation" of people living in the country illegally, he quickly laid the groundwork for locking more of them up while they awaited the outcome of their cases. One year later, the costs of those detentions are coming into focus.
The price tag to expand the detention system in dollars is $45 billion, pushed through last summer as part of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The money, to be spent over four years, is meant to increase the number of detention beds administered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. At last count, in February, ICE was holding 68,000 people, up from 40,000 at the start of Trump's second term. The administration has a goal of reaching a total capacity of 100,000 beds, and it's launched a controversial effort to convert warehouses into holding facilities and aggressively expand detention capacity.
The cost to individuals' liberty is also increasing. The average "in custody length of stay" — which measures how long current detainees have been locked up — has reached 73.6 days. That's almost a week longer than it was when Trump was sworn in.
"You're explicitly hearing and seeing the government using it as punitive and as a deterrent," says Javier Hidalgo, a legal director at RAICES, an advocacy group in San Antonio. It offers legal aid to migrants held at the ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas.
Hidalgo says detention appears to have become a way to pressure people to give up fighting deportation.
"Probably every single family that gets detained at Dilley gets confronted with this choice of, 'Hey, if you don't want to be here with your kid in detention going through these horrible conditions, you could voluntarily give up your case,' " he says. Hidalgo adds that the facility prominently posts sign-up sheets where detainees can request quick repatriation.
Detention stays are lengthening in part because of the administration's decision last summer to restrict bond hearings in immigration court. It used to be the case that getting released on bond was the norm for people who'd entered the country unlawfully but had community ties and weren't considered a flight risk while their cases were pending. But that was a misreading of the law, says Charles Floyd, first assistant U.S. attorney for western Washington state. As an immigration judge, he pioneered the administration's current interpretation of federal law, restricting bond hearings.
"It's the fairness of the thing," he says. As he understands the law, since someone intercepted at the border has to wait in custody, so should someone who's been living in the country illegally for years.
"Until we decide whether or not you should be lawfully admitted — which is a legal term of art — until someone makes that decision, you should be held," Floyd added.
The administration's policy has faced legal challenges but remains in place. In the meantime it's created unexpected strains, which are disrupting the federal courts.
"It was like an onslaught," says Troy L. Nunley, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of California. He says last fall he and his fellow judges started to see a wave of habeas corpus petitions from people held in the immigration system, asking to be released. Nunley says habeas petitions jumped from 20 in September to 713 in January.
"These are drastic numbers," he says. And it's getting in the way of the court's regular work, such as lawsuits and criminal cases.
"We're pushing them to the backburner. There are a lot of cases that we could get to that we can't, because immigration is the order of the day," Nunley says. "If there was a trial going on right now, I couldn't do a trial right now. There's just way too many."
Similar waves of habeas corpus petitions have been swamping other federal courts around the country, especially those with ICE detention centers in their districts.
These costs are worth it, though, for supporters of Trump's immigration policies. They say the system has been too lax for too long, releasing people who they say, by law, should have been held.
"It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that if you break our immigration laws, you end up in detention," says Rosemary Jenks of the Immigration Accountability Project, a group that advocates for tighter immigration enforcement. She believes one benefit of more detention may be less illegal immigration in the future.
"You have a deterrent effect because some people who are thinking about coming into the United States illegally think, 'Well, I don't want to be in detention, so I'm not going to go,' " Jenks says.
There's also a belief inside ICE that detention is necessary to make sure people don't "abscond" from the system as deportation nears, says Claire Trickler-McNulty. She was an official with ICE during the Obama administration and part of the first Trump administration, and then again under Biden. She came away frustrated by what she saw as an institutional bias in favor of detention.
"There is a sense that the only way to get to removal [deportation] is through detention, that only if somebody's sitting in a detention bed, you have them in custody, you load them on the plane, you send them back," she says.
There is some evidence that alternatives to detention, including electronic monitoring methods such as smart phone apps and ankle bracelets, or regular check-ins with case managers, can keep people in the system during years-long immigration cases.
What has not been properly studied, she says, is how effective those alternatives are in the final stages of a case, when deportation looms.
"We know that lots of people [in alternatives to detention] comply with removal orders," Trickler-McNulty says. "They turn in their ankle monitors or their technology. They are met at the airport and they depart. We know that people on bond depart because the bonds are returned," she says. But she says that anecdotal evidence needs to be checked by a more methodological study.
"I don't think we've done a really good look at what are the markers of how people comply. Are there ways to determine that someone will comply without additional help [in returning to their home countries]?" she says.
If alternatives to detention are found to be effective, she says the stakes are potentially huge. Detention can cost $125 or more per person per day, while alternatives, such as electronic monitoring, usually cost less than $10. That could translate to a savings of millions of dollars, not to mention years of collective time spent in custody.
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