Sanctuary cities and counties declined to turn over 17,864 illegal immigrants in police custody to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that those jurisdictions rejected thousands of requests by the federal agency for local jails to hold illegal immigrants in custody on criminal charges so federal authorities can transfer them into ICE custody, where they would have gone through deportation proceedings.
“How many times last year, 2025, were your detainers not honored?” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked Noem.
“17,864 detainers were declined,” Noem said.
In that same time frame, according to Noem, 201,340 detainers had been submitted by ICE nationwide.
Jordan and Noem did not clarify if 2025 was in reference to the calendar year or fiscal year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2024, through Sept. 30, 2025. The DHS and ICE did not respond to requests for clarification.
Although more than 90% of detainer requests were honored, Noem did not state how many of the roughly 184,000 illegal immigrants that were the subjects of those honored detainers were ultimately picked up by ICE.
ICE has not released public data on the number of detainers it issued in fiscal 2025. However, historical data showed that detainer requests ranged from 31,000 to 171,000 per year between fiscal 2017 and 2023. Detainer requests peaked in 2011 at more than 309,000 under former President Barack Obama.
ICE will submit a request for someone to be detained 48 hours beyond their release date, according to its website, “after officers or agents establish probable cause to believe that an alien is removable — typically after a court has convicted them of one or more crimes — and typically when the alien poses a public safety or national security threat.”
Noem added that detainer requests were viewed by the DHS as a way for federal law enforcement to apprehend illegal immigrants with possibly violent histories in a safer setting than on the street.
“When we have detainers that are honored, we can go into a courthouse, we can go into a jail or a prison and in a safe environment, take custody of that individual, take them to a detention center and remove them to their home country,” Noem said. “When they don’t honor detainers … hundreds and hundreds of times, thousands of times across the country, those individuals reoffend, and what they’re doing by not honoring detainers is creating more victims.”
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Jordan noted that 68.5% of U.S. cities and counties will cooperate with ICE and honor detainer requests.
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will consider the Sanctuary Shutdown Act of 2026, which would ban, at the federal level, cities and counties from not cooperating with ICE on detainer requests.