Prison (Wikimedia Commons)
By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative reveals how President Donald Trump’s administration is driving mass deportation by secretly using local jails—even in places with sanctuary policies—to detain immigrants. The report, Hiding in Plain Sight: How Local Jails Obscure and Facilitate Mass Deportation Under Trump, details how these local facilities, through contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service, have become a critical infrastructure in Trump’s deportation strategy.
Building on the organization’s previous work explaining how county jails enable state and federal incarceration, this latest analysis breaks down the overlap between local criminal justice systems and federal immigration enforcement. The report also provides extensive data tables showing the level of involvement in every state and in over 600 specific jails. “The Trump administration is circumventing city and county sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities,” the report said. “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.” This strategy, according to the report, turns civil immigration matters into criminal cases, thereby allowing the federal government to detain people in local jails even where sanctuary laws are on the books. As a result, local communities are unknowingly participating in federal deportation efforts.
The report also makes clear that ICE’s official numbers don’t reflect the full scale of immigrant detention in the United States. While ICE reported an average daily population of 57,200 in June 2025, the actual count—including people facing immigration-related criminal charges, those held on ICE detainers, and individuals confined in state-run facilities or overnight hold rooms—reaches approximately 83,400, a 45 percent increase over ICE’s published figures. “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 Jacob Kang-Brown, author of the report. “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.”
Since Trump’s return to office in January, 45 percent of all ICE arrests have occurred in jails. The report explains how ICE capitalizes on local arrests, often for minor offenses that wouldn’t result in jail time for U.S. citizens, such as driving without a license, to target immigrants. These arrests, the report notes, create a misleading appearance that ICE is focused on serious criminal activity, when in fact most detainees have little or no criminal history. The report offers reporters and advocates access to detailed data that shows how many people are held for ICE and the U.S. Marshals in hundreds of facilities, including the change in these populations over time. It includes the share of detained immigrants in each state held by local jails, the rates of ICE arrests occurring in jails compared to other locations, and the growing number of immigrants arrested by the U.S. Marshals on charges related to immigration status. The report also includes information on per-diem payments made by the U.S. Marshals to local jails in exchange for housing federal detainees.
It concludes by urging counties to end all collaboration with federal immigration enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service, which holds contracts with nearly 1,000 local jails nationwide. “Via their jails, local governments are—intentionally or not—providing the infrastructure for a massive attack on immigrants,” the report said. “But by resisting cooperation with President Trump’s racist deportation machine, counties and states also have the power to contain it.”