This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers (July 11, 2026) - EUROPE SAYS
Welcome to the weekly segment called This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers! I’ll highlight some of the main takeaways from the week’s news that you might have missed, but do it in a unique way. Rather than. . .
Welcome to the weekly segment called This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers! I’ll highlight some of the main takeaways from the week’s news that you might have missed, but do it in a unique way. Rather than try to summarize everything, I’ll pick a handful of figures each week that best capture where things are moving, explain why they matter, and provide a source where you can learn more. If you have a number to add to the mix or have a question about any of the numbers here, let me know in the comments. Leave a commentThe number of people a federal judge in Nevada ordered released after finding that ICE kept detaining immigrants under a policy he had already ruled unlawful. In March, Judge Richard Boulware II ruled that ICE cannot automatically jail everyone facing deportation, a decision the ACLU of Nevada estimated would let roughly 60 people a week seek release after an immigration arrest. This week Boulware found that ICE had continued the administration’s “mandatory detention” policy anyway, and he accused the government of “governmental lawlessness” for ignoring a binding order it never appealed. The finding came in a suit brought on behalf of seven people who said they were arrested without a proper warrant and held with no chance to ask for bond. Boulware ordered all seven released and barred ICE from detaining them again until their removal cases are heard, writing that ordering a bond hearing at this point “would effectively allow the Government to transform an unlawful detention into a lawful one. ” More than a hundred judges nationwide have now ruled against the mandatory detention policy that the administration has called central to its deportation agenda. The price the federal government paid CoreCivic for two of the largest immigration detention centers in California, buying the buildings outright while leaving the private prison company in charge of running them. The Department of Homeland Security bought the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County and the California City Detention Facility in Kern County for a combined $1. 5 billion, paying $739. 2 million for the 1,994-bed Otay Mesa site and $732. 6 million for the newly opened 2,560-bed California City site. The sale closed July 2. CoreCivic expects to keep operating both facilities under its existing ICE contracts, which run through August 2027 and December 2029. According to a Brennan Center for Justice analysis cited in the reporting, the purchases are part of a broader federal effort to build detention capacity that does not depend on the two largest private prison contractors, and one likely aim is to shield the facilities from state and local oversight. California law lets state and county officials inspect immigration detention centers, and Otay Mesa has already been the subject of a legal fight over blocked health inspections. Owning the buildings gives the federal government a stronger claim to immunity from those local rules. The number of men still held in ICE detention from a set of courthouse arrests that a federal judge had ordered stopped. In May, U. S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered a halt to ICE arrests at the 26 Federal Plaza immigration courthouse in Manhattan while a lawsuit over the practice moves forward. Attorneys for the immigrant rights groups that brought the suit have since counted at least five arrests at the courthouse after that order. Three of those people were released without explanation, and two men arrested in late June remain detained, awaiting rulings on their habeas petitions. Lawyers noted that at least one had no criminal history beyond a trespassing charge tied to his border crossing. This week the Justice Department fought to keep secret its specific reasons for the arrests, while an ICE supervisor defended courthouse arrests as safer for officers than arrests on the street. The nonprofits argue the arrests defy the court’s order and chill immigrants’ willingness to show up for their own hearings. The number of major cases the Trump administration lost at the Supreme Court this term. Writing for SCOTUSblog, Cornell law professor Michael Dorf counts five significant losses for the administration in the term just completed. They came on tariffs, mail-in ballots, mobile phone location searches, birthright citizenship, and Federal Reserve independence. In each, the outcome would have flipped without the votes of the Court’s three liberal justices. Dorf argues this record does not show a Court resisting the administration. Four of the six Republican appointees thought the executive order limiting birthright citizenship was constitutional in at least some applications, and in the same stretch the Court handed the administration major immigration wins by allowing it to end Temporary Protected Status and to block asylum seekers physically at the border, both by 6-3 margins. The pattern he describes is a Court advancing long-standing conservative goals while the checks on this administration rest on a narrow and fragile set of votes. The bond an immigration judge set for a Long Island father held nine months in ICE detention, who attempted suicide three times while jailed and had no criminal record. Juan Bonilla Lagos, 32, of Plainview, was arrested in October 2025 while taking his five-year-old son to a doctor’s appointment, and was held at the ICE detention center in Batavia. He had fled Colombia in 2022 fearing for his life, filed an asylum petition, and had no criminal record. His family says he attempted suicide three times in detention and was living with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. An immigration judge set his bond at $30,000, his family posted it, and he was reunited with his wife and children this month. That was an extraordinarily high bond. TRAC data puts the national median immigration bond around $6,000 in recent years, so the amount set in his case ran roughly five times the typical bond, far beyond what most detained families can pay. His attorneys at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest note that he was one of the fortunate ones, since many detained immigrants have no legal representation at all and remain jailed even when they could be released. The number of emergency calls reporters reviewed from a Texas immigration detention center where a man died after repeatedly raising concerns about his mental health. Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant with a documented history of mental illness, died at Camp East Montana in El Paso on January 3, 2026, about a month into his detention. Reporters for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reviewed more than 160 emergency calls from the facility, along with staff records and interviews, and found a pattern of medical and mental health emergencies that staff felt unequipped to handle. Notes from the facility show Lunas Campos repeatedly asking for his medication, attempting suicide, and asking to be moved to a facility with a higher level of care. A lawsuit filed by his family alleges guards killed him and points to missed medication doses and the improper use of force and restraint. Camp East Montana opened as part of the administration’s push to hold and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time, and the records the reporters obtained describe a facility that could not meet the medical needs of the people it was holding. The legal relief rate for children with lawyers, compared to children without, in completed removal cases. This is one of those numbers that tells you almost everything about how due process actually functions (or doesn’t) in immigration court. Among children whose removal cases have been completed, 7 percent of those with a lawyer obtained some form of legal relief that let them stay in the country. Among children without a lawyer, it was less than 1 percent. That’s not a modest disparity. It’s close to the difference between a system that occasionally works for the people caught inside it and one that functionally doesn’t, and the entire gap comes down to whether a child, often a very young one, facing a trained government attorney completely alone, happened to have someone in the room who knew how to make their case. The number of people now subject to ICE’s expanded continuous GPS monitoring. Legal advocates filed suit last week challenging the scale of ICE’s continuous GPS tracking program, which the agency has now expanded to cover nearly 50,000 people. Electronic monitoring gets framed, over and over, as the humane alternative to detention, something you’d think advocates would welcome. But the people actually wearing the monitors describe a program that functions less like an alternative and more like a parallel form of custody, one that follows you everywhere you go and answers to nobody. Fifty thousand is not a small number of people to have under that kind of watch, and it’s a scale of surveillance infrastructure that deserves more scrutiny than it’s getting. The amount of Axon stock President Trump purchased before ICE announced a major Taser procurement contract with the company. President Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Axon Enterprise, the company that makes Tasers and other law enforcement technology, on February 10, 2026. Not long after, his own administration’s ICE announced a major procurement contract with that same company. I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions about the timing. What I’ll say is that this is exactly the kind of overlap between a president’s personal financial interests and his administration’s federal contracting decisions that would, in a healthier oversight environment, draw sustained and immediate scrutiny. The number of Venezuelans on a deportation flight from Miami that landed hours before catastrophic earthquakes hit Venezuela, more than 100 of them now missing. A deportation flight left Miami and landed in Venezuela recently, just hours before two major earthquakes, magnitude 7. 2 and 7. 5, struck the country. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a Human Rights First initiative that tracks deportation flights. They were taken to a hotel in La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit areas, and more than 100 of them are now unaccounted for, with survivors and rescue workers digging through rubble to find them. One survivor, 58-year-old Lisbeth Portillo, said she escaped the collapsed hotel with about 20 other deportees and walked roughly five kilometers through the wreckage before reaching a National Guard building where she could finally call her family. These were people who had just been forcibly returned to a country not of their choosing, placed in a building that then came down on top of them, with no say in either. Send me your data points and data tips!If you have new research, data, or findings related to immigration enforcement and detention that you’d like to see featured here, please send it to me. I’m honored that this Substack continues to drive media reporting, research, and public debate, but it does take effort and expense. If you can pitch in a few bucks a month or year, it would help enormously. Find an option that fits your budget ataustinkocher. substack. com/subscribe.