The number of non-criminals held at the federal immigration detention facility in Batavia has soared in recent months.
That upswing reflects state and national trends. As immigration enforcement has ramped up dramatically in President Donald Trump’s second term, the number of people in immigration detention has climbed to record highs nationwide.
In Batavia — the nearest such facility to Rochester —the average daily count of detainees increased from 638 to 745 in the 2026 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. But that increase was entirely fueled by the detainment of people with no criminal arrest or conviction. They now account for four of every five people held in the facility, reflecting a population that has grown by about 60% from the previous year, according to data published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The bed capacity of the Batavia facility is 650, meaning it is overcrowded by nearly 100 on average.
This is while the average number of detainees with a criminal history declined by 50%.
The federal administration has maintained its primary focus as going after the “worst of the worst” as it sought to achieve “the largest domestic deportation operation” in history.
“What we've seen since the very beginning of their second administration, over a year ago, is their effort to continuously try to deliver on their horrifying mass deportation agenda, which is going to leave us all the worse off for it,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “And in this moment, what we're seeing is their enforcement strategy is, ‘We have to meet this quota. We don't care who we're picking up.’”
The drop in Batavia’s average daily count of people with criminal histories coincides with a drop in average length of stay. Both now stand at their lowest point since ICE began publishing detainment records in 2019. Those figures suggest detainees are moved through the system quicker.
In a written statement, an ICE spokesperson claimed the majority of arrests made by the agency are of people with prior criminal convictions or pending charges.
"ICE’s goal is to detain illegals and remove them from the country as quickly as possible. Despite a historic (sic) of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final deportations—home," the statement reads.
In a late January analysis by the New York Times, the number of deportations carried out by the Trump administration came in at 500,000, of which 230,000 were removed from inside the country and 270,000 from the border. That figure is larger than all four years of President Joe Biden’s administration combined.
The trend in detainments was not unique to Batavia. A WXXI News analysis of detainment figures found a similar pattern across detention centers in New York, and nationwide. New York also saw the lowest average daily count of criminal detainees on record so far in the 2026 fiscal year.
In the ICE data, a “criminal” is defined as any person with a previous criminal conviction at the time of their detainment, or a pending criminal charge.
Research into the correlation between undocumented immigrants and crime rates has largely concluded that undocumented immigrants have a lower offending rate than legal U.S. born citizens.
For example, a 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice, focused on Texas, found undocumented immigrants had a homicide arrest rate about half that of the U.S. born population. Similar trends were reported across other violent and drug crimes.
“During this time, undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types, with documented immigrants generally falling between the other two groups,” the study reads.
Another 2024 study from the American Immigration Council detailed 19 peer-reviewed reports published between 2017 and 2024. All found that a higher population of immigrants in an area either had no effect on violent or property crime rates or correlated with lower reported crimes. For areas with high populations of undocumented immigrants specifically, the study noted a lower rate of drunk driving, drug arrests, and reported rape.
There was no correlation found between higher concentration of undocumented immigrants and other varieties of crime.
