ICE Severely Undercounts Number of People in its Custody - Documented
documentedny.com
ICE's reporting on detention data doesn't account for the total number of individuals detained in immigration detention facilities.

A new report finds ICE failed to count 203,350 individuals as part of its total detention population between 2019 and 2022 — nearly 42% of the total people detained.

The faulty and inaccurate data is the focus of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s latest report, which found that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s current reporting methodology did not account for the population of individuals who were initially held in certain temporary facilities before being moved to an ICE detention facility.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240826162204/https://documentedny.com/2024/08/21/ice-severely-undercounts-number-of-people-in-its-custody/

  • @gAlienLifeformOP
    7•18 days ago

    So it sounds like, from the article, that ICE wasn’t counting those individuals because CBP was/they were initially booked in by CBP?

    Those were some of the previously unreported detentions, but ICE’s record keeping has been so sloppy we can’t say what percentage of those were caused by that or something else, or why ICE thought they didn’t have to report these detentions (like, they couldn’t point to a policy to explain why they did count those detentions between 2019-2021 but then just stopped in 2022).

    The agency also failed to be transparent about whether its methodology for determining which detentions of individuals are included or excluded in its reporting has changed over time. In particular, officials told the GAO that ICE included tens of thousands of detentions of individuals where the first stay was at a specific CBP holding facility for 2019 through 2021. However, ICE decided not to include detentions of individuals held in that same holding facility in their calculation of initial book-ins for fiscal year 2022.

    [Ital. added]

    Also

    Yea it should be addressed but it’s written to sound like ICE was hiding 200k people in their facilities

    I mean, we told ICE to report on how many people they were detaining, then had some auditors double check the number they reported, and the auditors found they didn’t report about 42% of the people in their custody, which hid about 200k detained people from lawmakers and policy advocates and anyone else who cares how many people we’re locking up to maintain our immigration system.

    It might just be rampant incompetence and apathy on ICE’s part, but given all the reports of racism and abuse we’ve seen come out of that agency in particular there’s almost certainly a lot of nefarious behavior being concealed by the incompetence and apathy.