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When US President Trump stood at the podium during his January 2025 inauguration, he announced that deportation would be a defining focus of his presidency. "We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” he said. Since then, his administration has carried out sweeping and violent raids and arrests in pursuit of this deportation agenda. The US network of immigration detention facilities - already the largest in the world - rapidly expanded as thousands of migrants were torn from their families and communities and locked up. By early 2026, daily immigration detainee numbers had surged to more than 70,000, peaking at 70,766 on 25 January 2026, the largest population of detainees since ICE’s creation in 2002.
But the United States is far from alone in this effort to expand detention, and many European countries seem intent on replicating similar ICE practices in their countries.
In Egypt, authorities have ramped up efforts to detain and deport Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers, thousands of whom had sought safety in the country amidst Sudan’s ongoing civil war.
In Russia, migrant workers - particularly those originating from Central Asia–have been arrested and detained in sweeping raids, with more than 54,000 reportedly forcibly deported in 2025 and others coerced into fighting in Ukraine.
In the Dominican Republic, efforts to expel Haitians continue unabated, with pregnant and postpartum women even targeted in maternity wards.
In Saudi Arabia, up to one million migrant workers were arrested in a single year for violating the terms of their draconian labour contracts.
And in Brussels, EU member states have adopted new deportation rules, called the EU Return Regulation, permitting member states to detain both children, separate families, and deport people to countries they have never visited.
States typically impose immigration detention measures, which can last for a few hours to several years, to ensure that a person is deported, to verify their identity, or to prevent absconding during a legal process. While there are important norms provided by international treaties - including that children should never be harmed, that refugees should never be punished for fleeing across borders, and that detention should only be used as a last resort—more and more states are refusing to adhere to these obligations. Some states like Australia, for example, continue to order mandatory detention for anyone without a visa; others like Malaysia continue to detain thousands of children each year, with babies reported amongst those detained.
A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that detention inflicts serious and varied harms upon migrants and refugees. In addition to physical health issues stemming from poor detention conditions, overcrowding, and inadequate medical access, there is a high prevalence of mental health problems that detainees develop both during their detention and after their release. In a recent report for the WHO, the Global Detention Project (GDP) concluded that the only way to prevent the damaging health impacts of immigration detention was to fully avoid it “during migration and asylum proceedings.”
Nevertheless, the practice continues to grow. Precise data regarding the number of immigration detainees around the world is limited as most countries do not provide statistics, the locations of detention centres, or details of their immigration detention operations. States are also increasingly trying to prevent monitoring of their detention sites. However, evidence indicates that the practice of detaining non-nationals is rapidly expanding, both within. Any countries and across borders. The GDP, which monitors immigration detention around the world, has documented hundreds of new facilities in recent months, many of which are located in countries that previously do not appear to have had active immigration detention systems.
In many parts of the world, States are increasingly using detention and other immigration enforcement measures as a policy tool to appear “tough” on migration amidst the rising demonisation of migrants and refugees. There is also a growing tendency for destination countries to outsource—or externalise—migration controls to third countries. Schemes range from efforts to prevent arrival to setting up asylum processing and expulsion in third countries (so-called “return hubs”)–all of which is leading to the emergence of new detention systems in countries where there was previously little indication of such practices.
Perhaps most extreme of these efforts have been those of the Trump administration to forcibly remove migrants and asylum seekers to countries with which they had no prior connection. Since 2025, several hundred third-country nationals have been deported to countries like El Salvador, Eswatini, Panama, South Sudan, Ghana, Guatemala, and Costa Rica where, upon arrival, many were instantly locked up.3 In Eswatini for example, deportees were detained without charge or due process in the Matsapha Correctional Complex, a notorious maximum-security prison which has been heavily criticised in the past for abusive practices. In South Sudan, deportees were placed in a guarded complex in Juba, the location of which authorities refused to disclose.
The EU is likewise aiming to expand third-country arrangements. The push to create “return hubs” signals an intensification of externalisation practices, raising concerns that detention regimes may become entrenched in an increasing number of states. This approach builds on a longstanding pattern of European engagement with North African countries, where partnerships aimed at preventing migrants and refugees from reaching Europe have fostered the growth of detention systems–most starkly in Libya–where migrants face brutal conditions and widespread, well-documented rights abuses.
What we are witnessing today with the expansion of immigration detention should come as no surprise. Observers, including at the GDP, have long warned that immigration detention is a power that is inherently vulnerable to misuse and stubbornly resistant to reform, precisely because it is a form of imprisonment that is not subject to the same judicial checks as criminal procedures and because it involves a population that is exceptionally powerless.
In a recent annual report, Norway’s independent immigration detention supervisory board underscored the extreme vulnerability of these detainees. Describing Norway’s failure to implement many requested improvements at its Trandum Detention Centre, the director of the supervisory board lamented the challenges in reforming “how the state takes care of the people for whom it will soon no longer be responsible.” In contrast to criminal prisoners, who are released back into society after serving their sentences, immigration detainees at Trandum “will not be returned to Norwegian society. Soon they will be out of sight and out of mind for the authorities. In my view, this may make the immigration authorities less proactive and decisive when it comes to safeguarding the rights of detainees and rectifying unsustainable or reprehensible conditions.”
