Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ICE collects data on every person it encounters, arrests, detains, transports via flight, and deports.
TipGetting started with ICE data
Our ICE frequently asked data questions is a good place to start before analyzing the data. We also provide a codebook that describes each data table and the fields within them.
We recommend citing these data as “government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by [your organization].”
Latest data release
The most recent release of data covers ICE enforcement actions through early March 2026. We are actively seeking ongoing updates.
We include the original data from ICE. We also provide processed data to facilitate analysis as well as a tool to explore the data interactively.
We have several concerns about this new dataset.
First, and most important, we continue to have questions about the reliability of the encounters and removals data. These encounters and removals datasets are similar to the October versions but different from the late July release that we believe was most reliable. A comparison of the October and late July removals datasets is available here.
Second, in this version of the dataset, ICE omitted detention stints in hospitals and medical centers. This affects a small number of stints relative to the total—and therefore should not prevent analysis of the detention data—but it makes analysis of hospital stints impossible.
Third, ICE has redacted the “case_category” values for some individuals; comparing this release to previous releases suggests that these are mostly individuals who had credible fear interviews. For some of the individuals, ICE has also redacted detention release reasons (in the detentions table) and processing disposition values (in the encounters and removals tables). To obtain some of this missing information, we suggest joining the detention and removals tables to determine which individuals were booked out to be removed.
Linked data from 2012-2023
To enable longer-term analysis, we provide data for major ICE enforcement actions from October 2011 through September 2023 obtained by the ACLU.
The four tables are linked by unique identifiers for each noncitizen, but these identifiers differ from the latest data release and do not enable merging across the two data releases.
Download all the raw, original files from the 2012-2023 data (ZIP, 2.6 GB)
Historical data archive
We post below historical data that ICE produced in response to several FOIA requests by multiple organizations. Crucially, in some data releases, there are linked identifiers across data types such as arrests and detainers, allowing merges that enable tracing immigrants’ pathways (anonymously) through the immigration enforcement pipeline. The identifiers are, unfortunately, different across releases, only enabling merging within a data release.