The number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Ohio soared by nearly sixfold last year, according to a new analysis.
The analysis also found that detainees are moved around frequently and often to faraway places, making it difficult for them to maintain contact with legal counsel and families.
And despite President Donald Trump’s claim that his immigration crackdown was aimed at “the worst of the worst,” less than 5% of those detained had been convicted of violent offenses, the report said.
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance analyzed ICE data that had been obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and processed by the Deportation Data Project.
It found that while 117 people were detained in Ohio on the average day in 2024, that number soared to 656 in 2025 — the first year of Trump’s second administration. During the same period, the number of local jails under contract with the federal government to hold ICE detainees tripled from two to six.
The analysis also found that people were detained for weeks and that detainees were moved frequently. That could cause them to lose jobs — in addition to making it hard to stay in touch with their families and their lawyers.
For example, 535 detainees were moved from the Butler County Jail in Hamilton to a detention facility in Alexandria, La., the report said.
“The findings reveal a detention system defined by frequent transfers, relatively short detention periods for many individuals, and a detained population overwhelmingly composed of people without major criminal convictions,” it said. “Across all cases analyzed, the average length of stay was 55.71 days, while the median was 30.68 days, indicating that most individuals spend weeks in county jails and federal facilities before their cases are resolved.”
The report added that the Ohio jails act as an entry point to a system from which detainees might find it difficult — if not impossible — to escape.
“These patterns point to a highly networked federal detention infrastructure in which Ohio’s facilities function as intake and transfer nodes within a much larger national system, with long-distance pipelines connecting Ohio facilities to staging centers in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere — effectively isolating detained individuals from their families and legal counsel,” it said.
Immigrant advocates have taken legal action to keep detainees out of that system.
In March, the ACLU of Ohio sued the federal government, arguing that ICE habitually violated the law and its own rules by arresting people without warrants — and without doing anything to determine whether the person was a flight risk.
And earlier this month, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that immigrants who had long been in the United States were entitled to a bond hearing. If such immigrants can raise bonds, they can stay out of the detention system at least temporarily.
The three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based appellate court upheld federal courts sitting in Michigan.
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.