SJC Exchange Library

Originally posted by Wanda Bertram on 07/30/2025

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Hi everyone,

Building on our prior work explaining local jails' role in state and federal prison incarceration, this morning, the Prison Policy Initiative released a new report breaking down the involvement of jails in Trump's immigrant detention strategy.

The central finding of our report is that since January, the Trump administration is referring thousands more immigrants for federal prosecution for immigration-related "crimes." This accomplishes two things: It circumvents sanctuary policies that limit local jails' cooperation with federal immigration authorities, since federal pretrial detainees fly under the radar of most such policies; and it obscures the true scale of immigrant detention today, because federal pretrial detainees are held by the U.S. Marshals Service and thus are invisible in ICE data.

Other findings in our report, Hiding in Plain Sight, include:

• Jails and police departments play a key role in criminalizing immigration by detaining people until ICE agents can make an arrest. Since January, 45% of ICE arrests have been in local jails. (Counties do not have to be part of the 287(g) program to turn over pretrial detainees to ICE.)

• In 25 states, jails are the sole detention provider for ICE and the U.S. Marshals Service. However, in most places, jails can refuse to be part of these contracts, giving them significant power in the face of Trump's agenda.

• There are an estimated 252,000 available beds in "uncrowded" jails (jails that are less than 85% full) across the country, meaning that if sheriffs decide to take advantage of money from the federal government, there is much more detention space waiting in the wings.

Hiding in Plain Sight includes appendix tables with the data we used to produce this analysis. Of note, we provide a table showing the number of immigrants detained by ICE and the U.S. Marshals in over 600 local jails (and over 150 other facilities) at two points in time-January and April-showing where these populations are increasing.

Our report urges counties and states to end all cooperation with immigration enforcement, including U.S. Marshals contracts, which are active in nearly 1,000 counties and cities. We argue that these agreements aren't just morally wrong; they can easily lead to jail overcrowding and lawsuits.

The full report is available here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jails_immigration.html

I hope this is useful in your work. If you have any questions, please reach out.

Take care,

Wanda

Prison Policy Initiative