Vermont correctional facilities have held more than 900 detainees apprehended by federal immigration authorities since January 2025, according to new data released by the Vermont Department of Corrections Friday.
The numbers, compiled in a dashboard on the department’s website, represent the first comprehensive publicly aggregated state information on people detained in Vermont jails after apprehensions from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“Transparency is really important to us,” said Jon Murad, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, adding that its goal was to provide both custody and care. “The more the data is out there, the more people can see what we’re up against.”
While the state says the dashboard promotes data transparency, as the Legislature looks to hold state officials more accountable for immigration detention, advocates say more information and support are needed beyond numbers.
Emma Matters, an immigration attorney at the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, a group providing no-cost legal assistance to immigrant detainees, told VTDigger, “This is really something flashy and public-facing the Scott administration can do to distract from where they’re failing immigrants in Vermont right now.”
‘There’s been a big sea change’
Vermont jails held 25 people detained by federal immigration authorities just this week, a fraction of the 917 people transferred through Vermont jails since January 2025. The data doesn’t share individual-level information due to privacy concerns, but it aggregates monthly and yearly totals on detained immigrants along with demographic details, showing an average of 16 people held per day since 2023. Only one-fifth of the people detained as of Feb. 4 were sentenced or apprehended for committing a state crime, according to the dashboard.
Those detained in Vermont are part of a historic count of 70,766 people held in ICE detention as of Jan. 25, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an immigration data center at Syracuse University. The numbers come months after internal emails highlighted the challenges the Corrections Department faced with federal immigration officials.
Advocates like Will Lambek, a staff member with Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based immigrant rights group, said he was concerned the state dashboard didn’t necessarily reflect the historic crackdown under the second Trump administration. More people were held in Vermont detention centers in 2023 than 2025, for example, according to the dashboard.
“The concern is that they can publish this dashboard and the response could be that there hasn’t been much change under Trump, what’s the big fuss about?” Lambek said. “The reality is there’s been a big sea change.”
Under the second Trump administration, people apprehended crossing the northern border have dropped precipitously, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, while interior enforcement actions by ICE have ballooned. At least 107 people have been apprehended in Vermont outside of border crossings since January 2025, according to a tally kept by Migrant Justice. The group estimates its tally represents a more than a tenfold increase since 2024.
Lambek said he wanted to see more information on the dashboard that would reflect that shift, like what agency initially apprehended an individual, where the individual was apprehended and whether the initial apprehension happened in Vermont. Most immigrants who moved through the Vermont correctional system in 2025 were apprehended in other New England states like Massachusetts and Maine, Lambek said, according to his interpretation of the data.
These transfers could be part of the reason the number of female detainees has spiked, according to the dashboard. Between 2024 and 2025, the number of immigrant women held at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington more than doubled to 372, or almost 42% of immigrants detained by federal authorities last year. Only one woman was detained with criminal charges in 2024; none had criminal charges in 2025.
The dashboard, first announced this summer, took more than six months to publish. In the meantime, a group of Vermont-based activists put together and published their own tracker. Their citizen-science data shows that the Chittenden facility was almost always the last stop before female detainees were transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. Their data also shows that 72% of people held in Vermont jails in 2025 were deported.
While some independent groups aggregate federal immigration data, that data has become less reliable under the Trump administration, and it’s often only available at the sector level, making it difficult to understand immigration enforcement at a state level.
Haley Sommer, spokesperson for the department, said they don’t “consistently receive data on the initial apprehending agency,” and Murad said his department didn’t know where apprehensions happened or why. Although the majority of people are dropped off by ICE, Murad said, sometimes other federal agencies brought in detainees or dropped off detainees on behalf of federal partners. He said his agency doesn’t necessarily track which federal agency initially apprehended an individual.
“We’re the receiver,” Murad said. “We don’t have a lot to do with wherefore and whys of how people come to us.”
The dashboard can only look at who is detained in the state’s correctional facilities, and therefore can’t show the scope of people detained by federal immigration authorities and immediately transferred out of state. On Wednesday, Steven Tendo, a Ugandan minister and nursing assistant living in Vermont since 2021, was detained by ICE and transported out of state to a jail in Dover, New Hampshire.
A push for more state action
Immigrant advocates and attorneys have said that there is more the state can do to ensure immigrants can access basic rights while detained in Vermont.
The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project meets weekly with detainees, but said the scope of their work was reduced this fall when permission to bring in cellphones and computers for live interpretation ended. Now they said they have one landline that they use to call interpreters, which has reduced the detainees they’re able to meet with by about 75%, Matters said.
“DOC is at constant loggerheads working with us on this, especially including tools of interpretation,” Matters said. Murad said his department was working through language access issues.
In the Legislature, Matters said the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project and other advocacy groups were pushing for the state to provide paid attorneys for individuals detained within Vermont through H. 742, a bill that has yet to move from the House Judiciary Committee. There are not currently enough immigration attorneys in Vermont to connect every immigration detainee with an attorney, Matters said.
“The role of the Vermont DOC is part of the infrastructure of this campaign of mass deportation that’s separating families and uprooting people living and working in the state,” Lambek said. “It looks very different now than it did a year and a half ago.”
