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While it’s unclear how many people remain in ICE custody after resisting deportation, Abdalla-Omran’s case points to the much broader issue of immigration detention with no end in sight — he is among a hidden population of detainees who are effectively forever prisoners of the agency. ICE declined to provide current data about the number of people held in prolonged detention, but in fiscal year 2015 — during which ICE detained more than 355,000 people — some 3,166 of them had been held for more than a year, including 169 for more than three years, 32 for more than five years, and five for more than eight years.
That data, obtained through public records requests by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and analyzed as part of a forthcoming article in the Southern California Law Review, also reveals that those detained in for-profit detention centers were held the longest. Among those detained longer than five years as of 2015, 10 were eventually deported, nine remained in custody at the end of the year, four were released on bond, and one died.
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