The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency operates a network of 170 unofficial detention sites
around the country, called “hold rooms,” according to agency data obtained via the Freedom of Information
Act. Located in warehouses, strip malls, office parks, and ICE substations, the facilities are held to different
standards than the agency’s official detention facilities. They are not permitted to contain beds, and are not
required to contain toilets. Though agency policy limits the time a detainee can be kept in a hold room to 72
hours, federal data show thousands of violations of that rule, including many stays lasting weeks or months at a
time.
The Colorado Times Recorder is reporting for the first time comprehensive information, including addresses, on
all 170 hold rooms and the more than 140,000 detainees held in them between January and October of last year.
Though hold rooms have been used by ICE since at least 2011 as temporary facilities to house detainees
awaiting transport to official detention centers, federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and
analyzed by the Colorado Times Recorder show a dramatic expansion of their use coinciding with Donald
Trump’s return to the presidency. Until last June, the time limit for hold room detentions was 12 hours; the
Trump administration upped the limit to 72 hours soon after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisor
Stephen Miller and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered ICE to triple its arrest quota to 3,000 per day.
Now, in violation of the agency’s own rules, hold rooms increasingly serve as unofficial, undisclosed long-term
detention facilities.
Available data on the detainees held in these facilities extends only through October 2025, leaving us blind to
changes or developments in detention patterns over the last five months. Judging by the rate of hold-room
detentions during the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, we estimate that at least 60,000
people, in addition to the 140,000 accounted for in this data, were detained in hold rooms at some point during
those months. Every facility included in our analysis was in use during the time period covered by the data;
given the increase in detention activity, most likely still are.
The 170 hold rooms are spread out across every U.S. state except for West Virginia, as well as Guam, Puerto
Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Texas has the largest number of hold rooms, at
22. Of the 170 facilities, 130 are located in ICE field offices or suboffices. These offices, where immigrants are
often asked to report for appointments with immigration authorities, are not disclosed in ICE records or
elsewhere as long-term detention facilities, despite data showing many of them holding detainees for weeks at a
time. 37 of the facilities held detainees for longer than a month. According to the data, one detainee endured a
292-day stay in the Newark hold room (“NEWHOLD,” as referenced in ICE records, which uses a unique
seven-letter code for each hold room).
Two weeks ago, we published an exposé on the nine hold rooms that held more than 2,800 Colorado detainees
last year, making the Colorado Times Recorder one of the first outlets in the nation to report anything about the
secretive detention facilities. The attention generated from that article, including from members of Congress andColorado state lawmakers, prompted outreach from concerned citizens in other states, asking what we knew
about the facilities in their necks of the woods. Our previous reporting also attracted the attention of data
scientists who made this nationwide follow-up possible.
After publishing our initial story, CTR was contacted by organizers with No Concentration Camps in Colorado
(NOCCC), a coalition of organizations working to oppose the expansion of ICE operations. NOCCC, whose
volunteer membership includes researchers experienced in the statistical analysis of large datasets and the
cataloging and navigation of the Department of Homeland Security’s FOIA library, provided the knowledge and
expertise necessary to expand upon our previous reporting. With their help, we have been able to list and map
all 170 ICE hold rooms nationwide.
Two weeks ago, we reported that the use of Colorado’s ICE hold rooms changed dramatically after Donald
Trump returned to the Oval Office, holding more detainees for longer periods of time. Our analysis of the
national dataset covering all 170 facilities reveals that those changes are not isolated to Colorado. Nationwide,
many more people are being kept in hold rooms under the Trump administration than were before, and
violations of the length-of-hold rules have increased sharply.
Between September 2023 and the end of the Biden administration, more than 80,000 individuals were detained
in ICE hold rooms nationwide. That number jumped to more than 140,000 between Donald Trump’s
inauguration on January 20, 2025, and the end of the dataset in October 2025. On average, the data show 4,700
hold-room detentions per month under Biden, climbing to more than 14,000 per month under Trump.
During Biden’s last 16 months in office, detainee book-in and book-out times show 281 total detentions
exceeding 72 hours (though the rule at the time limited holds to 12 hours). During Donald Trump’s first nine
and a half months back in office, the number of detentions exceeding 72 hours increased from 281 to 5,011.
Federal data also reveal that Colorado’s hold rooms are not alone in detaining children and the elderly. Since
Trump’s return to office, the majority of the hold rooms nationwide (109 of 170) have held at least one child for
a period of time. Some of the rooms have held many more. The hold rooms in New York (NYCHOLD) and
Phoenix (PHOHOLD), for instance, held more children than any others in the nation during the period covered
by the data. 927 children were held at the New York facility, located on the 9th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, while
749 were held at the Phoenix facility, located in a federal building on North Central Avenue.
When we reported on the use of ICE hold rooms in Colorado, we noted that the oldest detainee held at the
Denver hold room between January and October 2025 was a 91-year-old man. The national dataset reveals that
the elderly detainee in Denver was actually the oldest resident of any hold room in the nation during that period,
followed by an 88-year-old.
The hold room with the most violations in the nation, meanwhile, appears to be the Krome hold room
(KROHOLD), located at a major ICE processing facility outside Miami. KROHOLD registered more than
1,300 violations of the 72-hour-hold limit last year. The Los Angeles hold room (LOSHOLD) placed second in
that category, with 681 violations during the same time period.
The busiest hold room in the nation during the period covered by the Deportation Data Project dataset was the
one located in Dallas (DALHOLD), which registered 13,361 detainees across the period. It was followed by the
Montgomery, TX, hold room (MTGHOLD) with 13,212 detainees, and KROHOLD, which saw 11,758
detainees across the period.
As with the Colorado hold rooms we reported on two weeks ago, the facilities with hold rooms nationwide
appear to vary dramatically in quality, from cells ensconced in glass-and-steel federal buildings to those kept in
windowless warehouses; from Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan to shoddy structures hugging regional airports.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, the address now listed as an ICE hold room appears to have, at one point, housed a
Spanish-language-learning school for children. On its website, the school advertised the site as “a safe and
inclusive environment that values the Spanish Language and Culture, and where children from different
language backgrounds develop Spanish skills through play.”
Below, we have included a map marking each of these facilities, in hopes of providing local journalists,
organizations, and concerned citizens with information about the hold rooms operating closest to them. We have
also included a list of each hold room broken down by state so that readers and researchers in each locale can
more easily find the facilities near where they live.
In addition to naming, listing, and mapping all 170 hold rooms, we also extracted critical detainee information
for each – like we did in our initial reporting on the Colorado facilities – including the youngest and oldest
detainees held at each facility, the longest stay at each facility, and how many times the facility has violated the
72-hour hold rule. Each pin on the map embedded in this article contains these statistics for each specific
facility. We have also included the seven-letter facility codes for each facility, to help other researchers search
the Deportation Data Project’s releases for facility-specific data.
Though the agency can and does relocate facilities, such as the Denver hold room, each facility below is
presented with the name, facility code, and address associated with it in the most recently available sources of
federal data. Facility locations may also be in flux due to the increase in states passing legislation to limit local
law enforcement cooperation with ICE, such as Maryland, where Gov. Wes Moore signed just such a law last
month.
At the bottom of this piece, we have included a note on the sources of federal data we relied on for this
reporting (and some of the quirks therein), as well as a link to a GitHub repository containing the original
datasets.
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