ICE detention facilities codebook¹

¹ A large team of undergraduate researchers contributed to locating each facility, and we thank especially Sashi Atkinson Osorio, Jeremy Estrella, Rida Fatima, Cassandra Haydis, Elliot Heywood, Simone Horowitz, and Alexis Muchnik.

Authors

Affiliation

Graeme Blair

University of California–Los Angeles

Hayley Labia

University of California–Los Angeles

We provide data on facilities in which civil immigration detainees are held, including their locations and the ICE field offices with responsibility for the areas in which they are located. We include every facility in which at least one detainee was held since January 1, 2025, along with facilities ICE has recently listed on its web site as newly-open. These include both facilities dedicated to immigration detention and others where noncitizens are briefly held, such as hospitals. No single public source provides a complete or up-to-date list of ICE detention facilities, so the data are compiled from ICE’s web site, FOIA requests to ICE by several organizations, and reference datasets on hospitals, jails, and prisons.

Data structure

Each row in the dataset represents one detention facility, identified by a “detention facility code” that matches the codes used in ICE’s individual-level detentions data.

The dataset covers facilities used for civil immigration detention, both short- and long-term, including dedicated ICE facilities, facilities operated under intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs), private contractor-run facilities, Bureau of Prisons facilities, U.S. Marshals Service facilities, CBP short-term holding locations that appear in ICE detention data, ICE hold rooms and staging areas, and hospitals where ICE has held detainees. It does not include facilities that hold individuals only for criminal offenses under immigration law, nor codes in ICE’s data that we have identified as administrative categories rather than physical locations (e.g., CBP movement coordination areas).

Data processing

We collated data on detention facilities from numerous sources, most obtained through FOIA requests by other organizations. We produced a facility-level dataset in the following steps:

• Collate ICE facilities data. We identified data posted by ICE or obtained under FOIA that included the identifier, name, address, or characteristics of detention facilities (see Section 2.1 for a list).
• Collate auxiliary data on locations. We added data from other agencies and organizations—primarily on hospitals, jails, and prisons—to locate facilities that appear in ICE’s data without location information.
• Geocode facility locations. We identified the most recent address for each facility, privileging recent ICE sources and excluding addresses that were clearly mailing addresses (e.g., PO boxes). We geocoded the addresses using the ArcGIS and Google Maps APIs, then manually reviewed every facility with multiple coders and corrected coordinates and addresses as needed.
• Add county. We assigned each facility to a county based on its geocoded location and the 2024 US Census TIGER/Line shapefiles.
• Add ICE field office. We assigned each facility to the ICE field office with responsibility for the area in which it is located, using the boundaries of ICE field office areas of responsibility. For Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, we used the field office identified on ICE’s field office web site.

Future work. We are working to add further information from the repository of facility data we have collected, including facility characteristics such as type and population held. We will update this codebook as the dataset expands.

Data sources

We list and link to each of our data sources. The detention stints data are posted on the historical data archive.

Name	Source	Date(s)	Contributor
ICE website facilities list	ICE	2026
Detention management spreadsheets	ICE	2021–2026
Dedicated and nondedicated facilities list	ICE	2018–2024
Over and under 72 hour facilities list	ICE	2019–2020
Facilities list	ICE via FOIA (# unknown)	2017	National Immigrant Justice Center
Facilities list	ICE via FOIA #14-09300	2015	Human Rights Watch
Facilities list	ICE via FOIA #07-FOIA-51185	2007	Global Detention Project
Detention stints with facility details	ICE via FOIA #14-09300	—	Human Rights Watch
Detention stints with facility details	ICE via FOIA #10-2554-527	—	Human Rights Watch
Detention stints with facility details	ICE via FOIA #2024-ICFO-05655	2015–2024	TRAC via ICE FOIA Reading Room
Detention stints with facility details	ICE via FOIA #2022-ICFO-22955	2015–2024	TRAC via ICE FOIA Reading Room
Detention stints with facility details	ICE via FOIA #2024-ICFO-41855	2000–2011	TRAC via ICE FOIA Reading Room
Facilities list	Vera Institute	2025
Facilities list	The Marshall Project	2019
Hold-room list	No Concentration Camps in Colorado	2026	NOCCC
EOIR lookup tables (tblLookupBaseCity, tblLookupInmate)	DOJ Executive Office for Immigration Review	2025
Census of jails	DOJ	2019	ICPSR archive #38323
Prison locations	DHS Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data	2025	Data Rescue Project and Data Lumos
Local law enforcement agency locations	DHS Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data	2025	Data Rescue Project and Data Lumos
Hospital locations	Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services	2025
Hospital locations	DHS Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data	2025	Data Rescue Project and Data Lumos
ICE field office areas of responsibility	Deportation Data Project	2025

We thank the Vera Institute, Human Rights Watch, and No Concentration Camps in Colorado for advice and input.

Inspect code

Fields

We describe the fields in the facilities dataset below. Codes and identifiers appear first, followed by name and location, metropolitan-area codes, geographic coordinates, the responsible ICE field office, and summary statistics on detention activity over the most recent year of available daily-population data.