The Rising Cost of ICE Flying Immigrants to Far-Flung Detention Centers

The increase in long-distance transfers makes it harder to fight deportation and boosts the cost to taxpayers.

A 19-year-old from India picked up near Miami. A 23-year-old Mexican man detained just up the Florida coast in Pompano Beach. An Afghan man arrested in New Jersey. Each of them, at risk of deportation, was flown thousands of miles to a detention center in the rural desert of New Mexico.

They’re among thousands of people the Trump administration has been shuttling across the country in recent months, boosting the cost to taxpayers while undermining the detainees’ chances of winning their cases. And it’s doing so even when detention space is sometimes available much closer to their homes.

Immigrants detained by ICE during the first month of Trump’s new term were taken across state lines at higher rates than previous administrations, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of more than a decade of detention records. Some detention centers along the Southern border are accepting detainees from the East Coast for the first time in at least a dozen years.

The shifts reflect a drop in border arrests as well as an increase in ICE raids across the country, often with the cooperation of local law enforcement. ICE declined to provide comment in response to a detailed message about the increase in long-distance transfers and Bloomberg’s methodology. A 2023 report from the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants called inter-detention transfers “a cruel and traumatizing form of abuse inflicted upon people in immigration detention” that pulls them away from their families, communities and lawyers. Watchdog groups contend it’s also part of a strategy to expedite deportations.

It’s “about putting immigration detention facilities in places where they are far from advocates and legal support,” said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at The Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit that studies incarceration in America. “They don’t want people knowing what’s happening in these facilities.”

A Bloomberg analysis of more than a decade of government data shows that 70% of immigrants detained in Louisiana and New Mexico end up deported, which is almost twice the rate of those detained in the Northeast, and is well above the national average of 53%. Immigration judges in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi are also among the least likely to grant asylum applications, according to a Bloomberg investigation last year.

From late January to late February, the rate of out-of-state transfers by ICE was higher than they’ve ever been in at least 13 years. Over those four weeks, four in 10 people in ICE custody were detained in a state outside where they were first arrested — compared to one in four from the Biden administration. Two-thirds of such transfers were to facilities along the Southern border. The average distance detainees were transferred to these facilities was also greater than previously recorded.

While the data analyzed by Bloomberg is through mid-February, transfers have continued in recent weeks. Bloomberg spoke with three men who were transferred from Florida to New Mexico in the last month and a half. They describe being shackled on a plane with little to no communication about where they were going. In New Mexico, they say it’s been harder to get communication about their immigration cases.

“Since January 20, we’ve seen a stark shift,” said Ian Philabaum, a program director for Innovation Law Lab who speaks with roughly a dozen people detained in New Mexico facilities a week. “The vast majority of people we talk to have been apprehended by ICE and removed from their communities on the East Coast.”

That includes people who were transferred just ahead of immigration bond hearings, Philabaum said, jeopardizing their chances of being released while their cases proceed. In some instances, they had already paid for an attorney and can’t afford another one, he said.

Prior to Trump’s second administration, very few people taken into ICE custody in the Northeast without a prior final deportation order were sent to the South. Virtually nobody from the Northeast was sent to New Mexico, while less than 1% of people were sent to Texas or Arizona. In the first four weeks of his new term, 12% of people detained in the Northeast were sent to Texas, 4% to New Mexico and 3% to Arizona.

The increase in long-distance transfers is at least partly explained by a drop in border arrests as crossings fell to historic lows, freeing up beds in the region. Interior arrests, meanwhile, have grown in volume. These raids can drain resources, requiring coordination between local police and the federal government; such partnerships have more than tripled since Trump returned to the White House.

In the first four weeks of Trump’s new presidency, ICE detained more people from 10 states in the US interior — such as Maine, Indiana and Wyoming — than any other four-week period going back to 2013, during President Barack Obama’s second term. ICE actually detained more people from the interior during the Obama administration. But its crackdown relied less on out-of-state transfers, especially to facilities in border states.

Bloomberg’s analysis shows that some facilities where detainees have been transferred from — such as a county jail in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Krome Hold Room in Miami — had the largest daily population of ICE detainees they’d ever recorded, indicating a strain on capacity.

While detention facilities in the South and Southwest have the most capacity in ICE’s system, the East Coast’s largest detention facility, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania had more than 400 empty beds during this time. The next-biggest detention facilities in the Northeast — in Buffalo, Plymouth, and Elizabeth, New Jersey — exceeded capacity during that period.

Shuttling ICE detainees across the country is expensive. From late January to the end of March, the number of domestic flights transporting immigrants grew 25% compared with the same period last year, according to data provided by Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights. ICE clocked roughly 1,800 hours of air time as well. Using rates disclosed by a former ICE director, Bloomberg estimates US taxpayers paid 29% more for such flights, or almost $31 million total, in the first two months of Trump’s term.

For immigrants in ICE detention, getting moved from the East Coast to the South or Southwest can significantly affect their chances of staying in the country. Their case can land in an entirely new jurisdiction, making it difficult for even their lawyers to find them. In many cases, attorneys for immigrants who are transferred by ICE to another jurisdiction tell their clients they need to find someone closer to represent them.

That can be hard to do. ICE detention facilities in the South and Southwest are more likely to be in remote areas, far from the limited number of immigration lawyers in those states. On average, just six such lawyers work within 100 miles of the biggest ICE detention centers in the South and Southwest, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Some facilities, including the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, the largest in the state, have no immigration lawyers within 100 miles. By comparison, there are more than 70 immigration lawyers within 100 miles of the Krome facility and 48 by Plymouth.

On average, a fourth of people detained by ICE in the South and Southwest are more than an eight-hour drive from where they were first arrested — a 48% increase from the Biden administration.

The 23-year-old detained in Pompano Beach, was shackled at the wrist, waist and ankles when he was loaded onto a bus at a detention center there and taken to the Miami airport. The 3.5-hour flight was tense. He had to use the restroom, and he was hungry, said the man, whom Bloomberg News is not identifying because he fears retaliation. A man in front of him kept vomiting.

The plane touched down in Albuquerque as the sun was setting, but it was hours later before buses arrived to take the men to a detention facility in the small town of Estancia, New Mexico. There, the 23-year-old said he misses his pregnant partner and her 9-year-old daughter. Now, he said, he’d rather be sent back to Mexico than spend another day in detention. But when a reporter spoke to him in early April, he hadn’t seen an ICE officer to ask for deportation papers since he arrived in New Mexico.

“There are many who already want to be expelled from this country,” he said. “If that is what they want, why don’t they do it?”