Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been ramping up its operations throughout the country. In New York, it has led to conflict between the state and federal governments, with Gov. Kathy Hochul banning formal cooperative agreements between local law enforcement and ICE. The ban would restrict county jails from detaining individuals who are arrested for civil immigration violations.
WAMC analyzed data from the Deportation Data Project regarding detentions and deportations in New York State to understand better the expansion of ICE activity across upstate New York. The analysis is of people arrested in New York State and first detained in a facility in a New York facility — outside of New York City and Long Island.
Here are three takeaways from the investigation. Press play above to listen to WAMC's Sajina Shrestha and Maryam Ahmad dig into their reporting.
Upstate New York saw a 2.6-fold increase in deportation for people who were first detained outside of New York City and Long Island. In 2024, 344 people were deported. In 2025, that number rose to 904. What's more, more people were in detention in 2024. Specifically, 438 people who were detained in 2025 were still in detention when this data was logged and pulled, which was March 2026. Also, while people were spending less time in detention in 2025, they were being moved around to different facilities more frequently.
More people with immigration violations are being detained and deported as opposed to convicted criminals. Immigration violations include people who may have overstayed their visa or are undocumented. In 2024, 82% of those deported were convicted criminals and only 5% of those deported were immigration violators. In 2025, immigration violators made up 46.5% of those deported. In 2025, 63.5% of people who remained in detention after being arrested had an immigration violation charge. In comparison, 27.2% of those detained had a criminal conviction.
A transfer between facilities and processing centers is known as a stint. A stay, on the other hand, is the amount of time someone spends in detention in total, regardless of how many transfers they have had. A person can have multiple stints in a given stay.
While the average number of stints was the same in 2025 as in 2024, people have been spending less time overall in detention. So, while people deported in upstate New York in 2024 had an average stay length of 108 days, people who were deported in 2025 spent an average of 65 days; people had shorter time overall in detention in 2025, but they were sent to different facilities during that time more often.
The most extreme example of this was a man who was reported to Romania after three months in detention in 2025. During those three months, he was moved between nine different facilities 14 times; those included facilities in New York, Louisiana, and Arizona.
The data showed that, in 2024, 96.5% of the people deported were men, whereas in 2025, men made up 92.3% of those deported. Amongst women, that number rose from 1.2% deported in 2024 to 7% deported in 2025. These numbers also include an "unknown" category in which the person's gender was not specified.
