A new report finds ICE failed to count 203,350 individuals as part of its total detention population between 2019 and 2022 — nearly 42% of the total people detained.
The faulty and inaccurate data is the focus of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s latest report, which found that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s current reporting methodology did not account for the population of individuals who were initially held in certain temporary facilities before being moved to an ICE detention facility.
Those were some of the previously unreported detentions, but ICE’s record keeping has been so sloppy we can’t say what percentage of those were caused by that or something else, or why ICE thought they didn’t have to report these detentions (like, they couldn’t point to a policy to explain why they did count those detentions between 2019-2021 but then just stopped in 2022).
Also
I mean, we told ICE to report on how many people they were detaining, then had some auditors double check the number they reported, and the auditors found they didn’t report about 42% of the people in their custody, which hid about 200k detained people from lawmakers and policy advocates and anyone else who cares how many people we’re locking up to maintain our immigration system.
It might just be rampant incompetence and apathy on ICE’s part, but given all the reports of racism and abuse we’ve seen come out of that agency in particular there’s almost certainly a lot of nefarious behavior being concealed by the incompetence and apathy.