🧊 A Record 73,000 People are Now in ICE Cages—and the Fastest Growth Isn’t “Criminals”
Nearly 67,000 are single adults, 6,000 are families—and the non-criminal group has exploded.
ICE detention in the United States just hit a new record high: about 73,000 human beings locked in cages and cells in immigration custody.
That number alone should stop the country in its tracks—because it’s not an accident, and it’s not “normal.”
It’s a choice. A policy. A moral collapse in real time.
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Here are the facts, pulled straight from internal Department of Homeland Security data and public ICE data points—without the spin, without the propaganda, without the “trust us” talking points.
This is the kind of number you see in a country that is trying to scare people, not serve justice.
One former senior immigration official, Doris Meissner—who led the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—put it plainly: “It is absolutely a record, certainly in modern times.” Former senior officials said they weren’t aware of another period in American history when the U.S. government held more people in immigration detention than this.
And family, that’s the part that should keep you up at night: this is unprecedented—and it’s expanding anyway.
Here’s what those internal figures show as of Thursday (reported on January 16th, 2026):
~73,000 people were in ICE custody nationwide—the highest level in ICE’s 23-year history.
That’s an 84% increase from the same period in 2025, when the detained population was below 40,000.
Of the 73,000: nearly 67,000 were classified as single adults, and about 6,000 were classified as family units—parents and underage children held together.
About 47%—roughly 34,000 people—had criminal charges or convictions in the U.S.
The rest were classified as “immigration violators,” meaning no U.S. criminal charges or convictions and held solely for civil immigration violations.
Let me translate one of those terms in plain English, because the system hides behind language on purpose: civil immigration violations are not the same thing as being convicted of a crime. Civil violations are often things like overstaying a visa or paperwork status issues—still serious, but not a criminal conviction. And yet tens of thousands of people are being detained like they’re violent threats.
And the most disturbing part is not just the total. It’s the direction of the surge.
Public government data shows a 2,500% surge in non-criminal detainees initially arrested by ICE—from 945 on January 26th, 2025 to 24,644 on January 7th, 2026. Over that same period, those arrested by ICE with criminal convictions rose 80%, and those with criminal charges rose 243%.
So when you hear people try to sell you a story that this is all about “dangerous criminals,” look at the numbers and tell me what they actually reveal: the fastest growth is in detaining people without U.S. criminal charges or convictions.
That is not “targeted.”
That is not “surgical.”
That is a net. A dragnet. A fear machine.
And we’re seeing what it looks like on the ground right now—especially in Minnesota.
The Trump administration deployed roughly 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis and surrounding communities in what DHS itself called the largest operation of its kind in its history. Protests intensified after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minnesota resident last week.
Family, when an agency is swelling detention to record levels, flooding cities with agents, and people are dying in the streets—this isn’t “policy debate.” This is a human rights emergency happening in plain sight.
And the cruelty isn’t abstract. It’s intimate.
It looks like agents showing up at workplaces and parking lots.
It looks like people too scared to go to work.
It looks like parents afraid to drop their kids at school.
It looks like communities learning to keep their heads down, speak less, and disappear.
And here’s the part they don’t want you to connect: the detention boom is being supercharged with money—$45 billion for expanded detention capacity, according to the same reporting—and ICE is expanding where it holds people, including military sites like Fort Bliss and even keeping detainees for days in field offices that were never designed for long-term detention.
That is how you normalize mass detention. You build the capacity first. Then you fill it.
I need you to understand what’s being built here: a domestic infrastructure for mass civil detention, at a scale former senior officials say they’ve never seen in American history.
If you can read that and feel nothing, something has gone numb inside the country.
And listen—none of this requires you to pretend the immigration system doesn’t need order. It does. But order without humanity becomes oppression fast. When the response to a complicated system is to build cages for 100,000 people at a time, that’s not “order.” That’s punishment as politics.
So here’s the question I want to ask you, plainly, as your brother:
What kind of nation do we become when mass civil detention is treated like a normal tool of governance?
Drop your answer in the comments so people can read it and wrestle with it together.
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Here’s a line you can copy/paste and send to three people:
A record 73,000 people are now in ICE detention—an 84% increase from last year—and the fastest growth is among people with no U.S. criminal charges or convictions. This is a fear machine, not justice.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
And they openly admit they want this number to keep growing and growing. It's so evil. And it's truly a money grab as well.
Shaun, as the times get darker, let's never fotget who we are:
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are. You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf