RI in the Dark as ICE Deportation Data Goes Silent

It appears that the federal government has stopped telling the public what its immigration machine is actually doing — and Rhode Island, home to New England's primary detention hub and roughly 175,000 immigrants, is left to take the Trump administration's word for it.

ICE has not released its semimonthly "Detention Management" report on arrests, detentions and deportations since April 9, 2026, when the agency reported holding more than 60,000 people in custody. The gap — now stretching past three months — is the longest since Congress mandated the reports in 2020, according to reporting first published by The Marshall Project. For six years the agency largely complied with that congressional requirement, with only short delays, including one last fall during a prolonged government shutdown. This blackout is different.

Into that silence, the White House has poured big numbers. The administration claims it has deported more than 605,000 people, with an additional 1.9 million "self-deporting," for a total of more than 2.5 million who have left the country since President Trump returned to office. In an email, the Department of Homeland Security told The Marshall Project that, through June 24, the administration had arrested more than 981,000 people and deported 948,000.

The independent record does not match the rhetoric. Analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University puts total removals during the Trump administration at 290,603 — just 7 percent more than were removed in the last full year of the Biden administration, despite the enormous increase in money and personnel poured into enforcement. The administration has never explained how it defines or tracks the 1.9 million it counts as "self-deportations."

"It's important for us to know what our government is doing, especially in the Trump administration, which is known for its fabulism," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. The demand for the data cuts across the political spectrum: at least three lawsuits are pending, including one filed July 8 by the conservative Oversight Project seeking what it calls the "true deportation statistics." The Deportation Data Project, run out of UC Berkeley and UCLA, has also sued, with The Marshall Project filing an amicus brief.

What the missing reports would clarify matters directly in Rhode Island. The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls is the state's only ICE detention site and functions as the de facto holding hub for New England — people arrested by ICE across the Boston Area of Responsibility, including sanctuary states with no detention of their own, are routinely held at Wyatt while their cases proceed. The facility listed 102 ICE detainees as of April 28.

Even as removals lag, detention has exploded. The daily immigration detention population hit a record of more than 73,400 people on a single day in mid-January 2026, and populations on every day since mid-June 2025 have exceeded the previous peak set in August 2019. The administration insists it is targeting "the worst of the worst." The data says otherwise: as of April 4, 42,722 of the 60,311 people in ICE custody — 70.8 percent — had no criminal conviction, and more than one in three people deported from detention in 2025 had no criminal record at all.

Rhode Island officials have already felt ICE's reach up close. On Nov. 20, 2025, a high school student interning for Providence County Superior Court Judge Joseph McBurney was detained by ICE outside the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence. Confronting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 4, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said of the arrest, "There was nothing professional about that entire exchange."

The state's response has been uneven. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley signed an executive order on Jan. 20 barring federal immigration officers from city property and directing that police not act as immigration agents. But at the State House, measures to cancel Wyatt's ICE contract — Senate Bill 2278 and House Bill 7436 — stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Complicating any push to close the facility, the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation, which operates Wyatt, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 13 with a plan to keep operating, and in May made a $250,000 host-fee payment to Central Falls — its first since 2021.

"As part of good governance, ICE should be reporting this basic data," said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center. Until it does, the people held in Central Falls, and the families waiting for word about them, are counting on numbers no one outside the agency can see.