New Report from Vera Institute of Justice on Immigration Detention

This week, Vera updated its ICE Detention Trends dashboard with new data through early August 2026. The interactive dashboard includes Vera’s analysis of millions of detention history records spanning from October 1, 2008, through August 5, 2026. The ICE detention data were obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and shared by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Additionally, Vera published an important new report with ten key takeaways from its analysis of the most recently available detention data.

One important finding is that ICE continues to hold a historically high number of people in detention. In July 2026, ICE detained an average of more than 66,000 people per day. The daily immigration detention population reached a peak in mid-January 2026 with more than 73,000 people detained per day.