Meanwhile, longtime government contractor Palantir was paid $30 million to extend a contract to build a system designed to locate people flagged for deportation. On Wednesday, the Trump administration disclosed it’s using Palantir’s AI models to sift through immigration enforcement tips submitted to its tip line.

The primary reason that Title 42 is not a good deterrent for this population is that they are not likely to be seeking to apply for asylum but rather to enter the country without being arrested, so that they can find jobs. Previously, single adults were likely to be incarcerated for an extended period after their arrest and possibly prosecuted criminally and sent to a U.S. prison. “They are sending back people very quickly, in hours,” said one Mexican seeking to cross. “The rumor is that chances of crossing undetected are higher, as you can try and try again without much consequences.”

“It feels like an invasion,” said a woman who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. She was protesting at the Whipple federal detention facility at 7 a.m. on a frigid, 12-degree morning. The woman, a restaurant owner, said she closed her business temporarily because she was trying to protect her employees who were immigrants. “It feels very much like a Nazi Germany situation to me. It needs to stop, and people need to know what’s going on.”

A Russian scientist working at Harvard Medical School has been detained in the United States and placed in immigration detention. According to multiple independent Russian media outlets and the scientist’s friends, she now faces possible deportation to Russia, where she could be subject to political persecution over her anti-war stance.

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly.

We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.

Within the first 12 months of Brexit immigration rules (up to December 2021), net migration jumped to 484,000; higher than any level in the past decade.

This trajectory has largely increased; revised government figures for the year ending June 2023 show record-breaking levels of net migration at 906,000 people.

In the four years before Brexit, net migration was higher from EU countries than non-EU countries.

Since 2019, data shows that the majority of net migration to the UK comes from non-EU countries; with figures at 662,000 in 2023 alone.

In fact, since 2021 when Brexit rules came into effect, net migration from the EU has been negative; meaning that more EU nationals are leaving the UK than coming to stay.

Brexit arguably had the intended effect of curbing EU migration. But the broader migration picture has simultaneously ballooned.

The top countries for non-EU immigration are India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China and Zimbabwe, according to the latest ONS figures.

While low-paid migrants are a drain on public finances, the OBR found that the average migrant worker pays more in tax than they receive in public services throughout their lives compared to British-born workers. This is mainly because they are not educated in the UK.

Research shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Studies have found immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated and undocumented immigrants are 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime.