70.6% of the 65,765 people in ICE detention have no criminal conviction — the July 2026 data

70.6% of people in ICE detention have no criminal conviction

The finding: as of July 11, 2026, ICE held 65,765 people in detention nationwide. By ICE’s own classification, 46,436 of them — 70.6% — had no criminal conviction: 20,247 had pending criminal charges and 26,189 had an immigration violation only, with no criminal charge at all. The remaining 19,329 (29.4%) had a criminal conviction. Every figure here comes from ICE’s own Detention Management spreadsheet, released July 20, 2026.

What changed since April

ICE publishes only the current snapshot; it does not publish the change. We bank each release, so the movement is visible here:

All of the growth is interior enforcement. The detained population grew by 5,454 over roughly 14 weeks, but ICE-arrested detainees grew by 6,803 while CBP-arrested detainees fell by 1,349. In other words, interior arrests more than accounted for the entire increase and offset a decline in border-arrest detentions. The share of detainees arrested by ICE rather than CBP rose from 85.3% to 88.5%.

The no-conviction share barely moved — 70.8% to 70.6% — so the composition of who is detained stayed roughly constant while the population grew.

What the data shows

• Roughly seven in ten have no conviction. The 70.6% with no criminal conviction breaks into 30.8% with pending charges and 39.8% with an immigration violation only. Just under a third — 29.4% — had a criminal conviction on record.
• Most were arrested by ICE, not at the border. Of the 65,765 detained, 58,231 (88.5%) were arrested by ICE in the interior and 7,534 (11.5%) by Customs and Border Protection.
• The largest facilities by average daily population (FY2026) are ICE’s El Paso Camp East Montana (about 2,026), Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia (2,010), Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi (1,878), the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall (1,703), and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California (1,686).
• Length of stay varies enormously. Across the facilities ICE reports, the FY2026 average length of stay ranges from about 2 days at staging facilities to roughly 86 days at the longest, with a median near 38 days.
• 141 facilities carry their own numbers. ICE’s spreadsheet reports facility-level statistics for about 208 facilities; 141 of them match a facility page on this site, each of which shows that facility’s own FY2026 average daily population and length of stay.

What this means in practice

These are operational statistics, not commentary. If you are trying to locate or support someone in detention, the facility-by-facility detail is on our ICE detention facilities cluster — each page lists the verified address, phone, the ICE Online Detainee Locator, visitation rules, and the facility’s FY2026 average daily population and length of stay. People in detention have a case before the immigration court (EOIR); for what rights apply during an ICE encounter, see Know Your Rights.

Method and caveat

The numbers are parsed directly from ICE’s Detention Management spreadsheet and republished without adjustment. Three distinctions keep them honest. First, the 65,765 detained total and the criminality split are a same-day snapshot (July 11, 2026), while the per-facility average daily population and average length of stay are fiscal-year-2026 averages, not same-day counts — they answer different questions. Second, ICE’s spreadsheet lists only facilities meeting its reporting threshold (about 208), so the facility figures are not an exhaustive roster, and the sum of facility populations does not equal the national snapshot. Third, the April-to-July comparison is snapshot-to-snapshot, not an average over the period — the population moves between releases, so the change is the difference between two single days, not a trend line. The dataset and charts are regenerated from the source file on every site build, and ICE replaces the file about every two weeks.

Download the data: ice_detention_stats.json — national totals plus facility-level average daily population and length of stay, keyed to each facility page.

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A newsroom, a legal-aid org, a researcher’s blog: drop in the national ICE detention count, the criminality breakdown, and — the part nobody else publishes — how much it changed since ICE’s previous release. ICE overwrites its file about every two weeks; we bank each one, so the widget keeps showing the movement. Paste it once and it stays current:

<iframe src="https://migrantusa.com/embed/ice-detention/" width="100%" height="620"
        style="border:1px solid #e2e8e4;border-radius:8px;max-width:640px"
        title="ICE detention population and change" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:.85rem">ICE detention population — data by
  <a href="https://migrantusa.com/datasets/ice-detention-population/">MigrantUSA</a></p>

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Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “ICE detention population analysis,” migrantusa.com/datasets/ice-detention-population/, retrieved [date], from ICE Detention Management data.

Related

• ICE detention facilities — every facility, with address, phone, locator, and FY2026 statistics
• 287(g) growth analysis — how local police were deputized for immigration enforcement
• Immigration courts by state — where detained people’s cases are heard