The National Immigrant Justice Center’s (NIJC’s) three-year Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation resulted in 2015 in the most comprehensive public release to date of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration detention center contracts and inspections. The thousands of pages of documents provide an unprecedented look into a failed system that lacks accountability, shields DHS from public scrutiny, and allows local governments and private prison companies to brazenly maximize profits at the expense of basic human rights. The project continues to obtain and analyze government documents and other records that shine a light on the obscure U.S. immigration enforcement and detention system.
Read our Reports:
Toolkit: Immigration Detention Oversight and Accountability (May 2019)
ICE Fiscal Mismanagement & Congressional Oversight (February 2018)
Deaths in Detention (February 2016 | June 2018)
Contracts (August 2015)
Inspections (October 2015)
Depositions of ICE Contracting and Inspections Experts (January 2014)
More Detention Data
ICE's detention facility list updated monthly at ice.gov
Comprehensive ICE detention facility list (November 2017)
This set of 10 lists includes data on types of contracts, demographics, medical care providers, and inspections history for more than 1,000 federal facilities that detain immigrants, including county jails, Bureau of Prisons facilities, Office of Refugee Resettlement centers, hospitals, and hotels (more on those down below). Customs and Border Protection facilities are not included in the data. Read NIJC's analysis of the data.
Detention Facility Documents
The following links contain documents NIJC and partners obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation between 2015 and 2020 and through state records requests from 2019 to 2024. Some facilities may no longer have active ICE contracts. More recent ICE detention contracts are accessible via the ICE FOIA library.