Targeting of ICE Detainers Varies Widely
by State and by Facility

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed detainers on approximately half a million individuals[1] during fiscal years 2012 and 2013, according to the latest government records. Detainers, often called "immigration holds," are a primary tool that ICE uses to apprehend the suspects it is seeking. These official ICE notices ask local, state and federal law enforcement agencies not to release suspected non-citizens held at their facilities in order to give ICE an opportunity to take them into its custody.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University obtained over 436,000 detainer records from ICE under the Freedom of Information Act, covering 21 out of 24 months during the past two years. While outcomes on some pending charges may not yet be known, these detailed records document that detainers were infrequently placed on individuals whom ICE has defined as its highest priority for removal — noncitizens who pose a serious threat to public safety or national security. Using ICE's classification of offenses from most serious (Level 1) to least serious (Level 3), only one out of eight — or 12 percent — of these individuals had been convicted of a Level 1 offense.

Only half of detainers were placed on individuals with any prior conviction. Even this ratio marks improvement over the record for the immediately preceding four years, FY 2008 to the beginning of FY 2012 (see earlier TRAC report). However, it is difficult to determine how much of this increase was due to better targeting of those convicted of crimes as opposed to ICE doing a better job in recording conviction information, especially for minor misdemeanors and petty violations.

Once misdemeanors and petty offenses are set aside, fewer than one out of five (18%) ICE detainers were for individuals convicted of what ICE classified as a level 2 or level 1 felony offense. (A number of these may actually be misdemeanors, but were classified by ICE as felonies when information is imprecise.) And as noted above, serious (Level 1) offenses were even a smaller proportion, just 12 percent.

Thus the overwhelming proportion of detainers — about four out of five, 82 percent — were issued for individuals who either had no convictions, or had at most been convicted of a misdemeanor or petty offense of some type. Traffic violations, including driving while intoxicated, were the most common offenses. Illegal entry was the next most common, followed by marijuana possession and miscellaneous drug violations. See Table 1.

Details by State

While half of all ICE detainers were issued on individuals who had not been convicted of any offense, some states had an even larger proportion. Missouri had the highest: 74 percent of its detainers were issued on individuals without any criminal record. Alabama was second with only 73 percent never convicted, followed by Kansas with 71 percent. Among states with the lowest percentages of detainers based on no criminal conviction were Idaho (29%), Virginia (34%) and Connecticut (35%). See Figure 1 and Table 2.

Details by Facility

About 3,900 facilities were recorded as receiving ICE detainers during this period. As shown in Table 3, these varied even more widely than did the states in terms of how often the individuals on whom detainers were placed had no criminal records. Even for facilities with over 1,000 detainers, the percentage varied from a low of 1 percent to a high of 95 percent.