Two New Mexico jails are holding the highest number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees since at least 2019 amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push. (Photo Courtesy Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency currently holds more than 58,000 people in jails nationwide, according to the most recent data, which is the highest number in at least five years amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push.
The trend is reflected in three New Mexico detention centers that have agreements with ICE to house detainees, according to a Source New Mexico review of data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse compiled from ICE’s response to its records requests. The number of ICE detainees in detention centers in Torrance, Cibola and Otero counties has steadily increased since Adril.
The TRAC data shows increases here every two weeks or so in the “average daily population” of detainees at each jail. That figure is the average number of detainees held each day divided by the number of days since Oct. 1, when the federal fiscal year began. (For example, if an ICE facility held four people on Oct. 1 and 6 people on Oct. 2, the average daily population on Oct. 2 would be 5.)
In two of three New Mexico jails with ICE agreements, the average number of daily detainees is the highest since at least September 2019, when TRAC first began publishing its detention numbers. Both have increased by more than 25% since this time last year.
On June 23, the most recent date for which data is available, ICE held an average of 435 detainees at the Torrance County Detention Center in Estancia. A year ago, ICE held 341 ICE detainees there.
On June 23 at the Cibola County Detention Center in Milan, ICE held 227 detainees in custody. A year ago, it held 180.
The Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral has not seen the same type of increase. It detains, by far, the most ICE arrestees in New Mexico. Its average population June 23 was 843.
While the number of ICE detainees there has steadily increased along with the rest of the state and country in recent months, it’s only now approaching its September 2024 levels, according to a Source review.
The processing center is dedicated to immigration detention and opened in 2008.
All three detention centers have been the subjects of recent lawsuits and complaints regarding inhumane conditions for inmates.
In Torrance County in early May, for example, advocates told Source that raw sewage was flooding cells. In Cibola County, the United States Attorney’s Office recently charged a corrections officer for colluding with a non-immigrant inmate to smuggle drugs into the jail.
As for Otero County, the Innovation Law Lab calls it “infamous,” saying thousands of detainees “have suffered within its walls, surviving inhumane conditions, woefully inadequate medical and mental health care, retaliation for speaking up, rampant due process violations, and other harms.”
Despite Trump’s promise of mass deportations, the increase in daily average inmates stayed the same for several months after he took office. Sophia Genovese, a Georgetown Law School professor who recently worked for the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, recently told Source that approaching 60,000 detainees is a worrying trend, especially after President Trump signed a bill drastically increasing ICE’s budget for arrests and detentions.
“When we hit 50,000 during his first administration, it was wild to see that,” Genovese said. “So now that we’ve got to 59 so quickly, it’s just kind of frightening to think about what’s going to happen six months from now.”
According to CBS News, a little less than half of the detainees have a criminal record, and fewer than 30% have been convicted of a crime.
See below for the current average daily populations at New Mexico’s ICE detention facilities: