From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, July 9th.

We'll spend some time here delving into the data behind the Trump administration's mass deportation policy.

Few individual stories of immigration detainees have made headlines.

The personal stories are so compelling, obviously, but there's a bigger picture here that can

fly below many people's radar.

The administration has enforced daily arrest quotas in immigration and customs enforcement, ICE,

remove temporary legal status for migrants from an array of countries, people who were here in legal status.

They've increased asylum, denials, and now there's news that about 58,000 people are currently being held in one of 200

ICE detention facilities across the country, 58,000 people now, and they're up to 200 of

these facilities, which may be the highest number ever recorded in history, that 58,000 immigrant

detainees at once.

That's according to Dr. Austin Coker, research professor at Syracuse University,

their Newhouse School of Public Communications there, his self-titled substack is dedicated to, quote,

decoding the U.S. immigration system with clear analysis backed by data.

And he joins us now with some of his findings. Dr. Coker, thanks for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Thanks for having me on, Brian. Glad to be here. Let's look first at this figure of people

currently being held in ICE detention, just under 58,000, you say. Can you put this number

into context for us? Where and when is this data

coming from and how accurate do you assess it to be? Sure. So we've been getting biweekly

detention data from ICE since late 2018 as a result of a congressional mandate. So this is data

that Congress requires the agency to produce. Prior to

2018, we only got intermittent numbers of how many people were in detention based on

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