Over the past year, the federal government has ramped up immigration enforcement with a focus on arrests. One of the key cogs in that approach is local jails and police departments cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative shows the differences in ICE arrests by state. The initiative’s Wanda Bertam talked with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Jimmy Gutierrez: We're seeing all-time highs in immigration detention, the criminalization of asylum seekers and immigrants, and yet the Trump administration is still well behind their own [target] deportation numbers. And your findings say that tells us something interesting about the power of local agencies.
Wanda Bertram: The last few months have established that the Trump administration can set high quotas, and it has, for immigration arrests, but actually carrying out those arrests is harder than some might think. Now, for that reason, ICE relies heavily on cooperation from local law enforcement. The single largest source of ICE arrests, in the last several months, has been and continues to be local jails.
Now, that's partly because there are agencies that have partnered with ICE in the 287(g) agreements. And so they're actively performing immigration enforcement duties on ICE’s behalf. But even in places that do not have 287(g) agreements, or even places where those agreements might be prohibited, jails are cooperating with ICE by honoring detainers, by sharing information and doing other things that basically allow ICE to piggyback off of local arrests to make immigration arrests.
Now, I want to be super clear about something from the jump, which is that a lot of the folks who are arrested by ICE out of local jails, who have previously been picked up by local police for violating local laws, have not been convicted because jails are primarily a place to hold people pretrial. So many of these folks have not been convicted, and furthermore, many of them have not even been charged.
So populations of people who are swept into jails by law enforcement, ICE is now taking advantage of this to make their arrests because it is so much easier in many ways than coordinating an arrest in the community.
So you break down 287(g) numbers in the paper and your findings, but you also have documented ICE arrests by state. And I find that interesting, because in Wisconsin in 2025, there [were] around 950 arrests, which is the bottom third of all states. And the majority of those arrests are happening in local jails and other lockup facilities. But, what trends are you seeing in the states with those higher arrest numbers?
Right. Well, what I noticed when I looked at the 50 state data that we have is that, generally speaking, the more ICE arrests per capita, the more they seem to be relying on jails. So Wisconsin is a little bit of an outlier here in the sense that a high proportion of arrests that are taking place in Wisconsin are taking place in local jails, but as you said, in the bottom third, when it comes to actual arrest numbers.
It has a total ICE arrest rate of 10 out of every 100,000 residents, but more than six out of each of those 10 arrests per 100,000 people are taking place out of local jails. So local jails are are providing really some key infrastructure here. What's interesting is that when you look at states that have strict requirements, that law enforcement do not collaborate with ICE in any way, states like Illinois, New York or Oregon — in those states, the proportion of ICE arrests that are happening in jails tanks. That has a huge impact on the overall number of ICE arrests.
If you look at Illinois and you look at Florida, which has way, way more ICE arrests, the difference between Illinois and Florida in the number of ICE arrests is taking place in Florida jails. And I think that's it's interesting and it's significant because it means that the way that local jails are, working with ICE, or choosing not to, and the way that state governments are, or are not, getting involved in those local policies has a huge impact.
