Donald Trump’s administration is shuttling hundreds of immigrants between U.S. detention centers every month, a practice that their advocates have slammed as a way to keep detainees locked in a byzantine, cross-country jail complex to prevent them from defending themselves in court.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out more than 1,400 domestic flights from detention center to detention center in July and August, averaging more than 700 flights each month, according to data from immigration watchdog group Witness at the Border.
That’s more than double the number of domestic ICE flights under former President Joe Biden, whose administration averaged roughly 350 such flights each month.
While detainee transfers are nothing new, the pace appears to be accelerating. There were 598 domestic flights in May, 697 in June, and 727 in July, Witness at the Border found.
Domestic transfers appear to be driven by Homeland Security’s strategy of keeping people in detention while they await their removal from the country. More than 56,000 people have been locked up in ICE detention facilities in the U.S. at any given point in the last several months. The number of people in ICE custody spiked as high as 59,000 in recent weeks, likely an all-time record that has exceeded the agency’s capacity to hold them by as much as 140 percent.
Immigrants are typically held in staging facilities for short periods before they are moved to other detention centers — sometimes hundreds of miles from where they were arrested — as space becomes available.
Many of those transfers are from states under Democratic leadership to Republican-led states, which house some of the largest detention centers in the country.
Fourteen of the 20 largest ICE detention centers are in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a network that immigrant advocates have labelled “deportation alley.” The jails — most of which are operated by private prison companies — hold thousands of people each year.
Texas facilities are currently holding more than 12,000 people. More than 7,000 people are in Louisiana’s immigration detention centers, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research project at Syracuse University.
Detainees are moved so quickly and frequently from one detention center to another that their attorneys and family members often have no idea where or how to reach them, according to dozens of court documents seen by The Independent.
Homeland Security officials have repeatedly denied that ICE is “disappearing” immigrants and has rejected claims of mistreatment and abuse while they’re in custody.
The Independent has requested additional comment from DHS.
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In the high-profile case of Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, attorneys could not reach her for nearly 24 hours as immigration authorities quietly shuffled her around facilities in three states before she landed in Louisiana, where she was detained for more than six weeks.
Ozturk, and Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, were among a wave of international students in the northeastern U.S. who were moved more than 1,000 miles from where they were arrested.
Jon Luke Evans, a Jamaican national who is a reserve police officer in Maine, has been moved to several facilities following his arrest last month. As of August 7, he still does not appear in ICE’s detainee locator system.
“These transfers often remove people away from loved ones and other support systems and can disrupt individuals’ removal proceedings by taking them to places where access to legal representation is virtually impossible,” according to the American Immigration Council, which is suing for ICE documents that explain the agency’s transfer policies.
Immigration attorneys have also claimed that federal authorities appear to be trying to get around limits on how long an undocumented immigrant can be held in local jails, giving ICE agents more time on the clock before they have to move them elsewhere.
In one recent case, reported by The Orlando Sentinel, four Guatemalan siblings held in a county jail in Florida were loaded into a van and driven around for hours before returning to the exact same facility. That appeared to reset the deadline for their removal from the local jail before being transferred to ICE custody.
The surge in transfer flights follows a spike in immigration arrests, as the Trump administration directs federal law enforcement agencies to focus on immigration enforcement.
In May, White House adviser Stephen Miller announced on Fox News that the administration had set a goal of arresting 3,000 people a day, and that Trump “is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day.”
But in court filings, government lawyers have denied any such arrest targets. ICE has not been directed to “meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” lawyers for the Trump administration wrote to a federal appeals court last week.
Between July 1 and 27, ICE averaged 990 daily arrests, down from 1,224 the previous month, according to government data analyzed by TRAC.
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