Congress requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report statistics showing how many people are held in its detention centers overnight. But researchers say the data includes anomalies that indicate the Department of Homeland Security is underreporting detentions, and Democratic lawmakers want to investigate.
Each year’s funding bill for DHS has a mandate for the department to disclose twice a month the average number of individuals held at its detention centers. According to the agency’s most recent report, which was published last week, those numbers abruptly dropped at 96 facilities by an amount that one researcher said literally does not add up.
“The numbers that ICE reported for some of these detention facilities were too low to be possible. An average at that point cannot drop that far, that quickly,” Adam Sawyer, a data researcher and former associate at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, told NOTUS.