- Michigan’s immigrant population has been small compared to other states, even though the state annually takes in some of the most refugees and temporary visa workers.
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Michigan and Ohio has historically contributed little to national immigration enforcement totals.
- Four Michigan county jails let ICE use their facilities to detain immigrants. Data only gives a small glimpse into the number of people detained each year – and many may be from out of state.
There’s a lot of news about immigration right now spurred by President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations in his second term.
But federal sources of data on immigration enforcement activity since the new administration took over have been inconsistent, confusing and incomplete.
While we wait for more and better data on how immigration or enforcement activity actually has or hasn’t changed under the Trump administration in our state, Michigan Public put together some information about the state’s historical immigration data to help you put new information in context.
Click on any of the questions below to jump to a specific section.
How many immigrants live in Michigan?
How many of Michigan’s immigrants are undocumented?
How many seasonal immigrant workers come to Michigan? (H-2A and H-2B visas)
How many people does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest and deport in Michigan?
How many people does ICE detain in Michigan?
Have a question that isn’t answered here? Email the question to amplify@michiganpublic.org and we may update this post with answers.
How many immigrants live in Michigan?
The most reliable recent estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau puts Michigan’s foreign-born population at just over 700,000 people.
That number includes anyone who was not a U.S. citizen at birth — refugees, people on visas, naturalized citizens and people who are in the U.S. without legal status.
Census estimates likely undercount immigrant populations. But it is the best data available.
It shows immigrants make up a small — but growing — portion of Michigan’s population. But relative to other states, Michigan is kind of in the middle of the pack.
While Michigan’s overall foreign-born population is relatively low, the state does stand out for certain types of immigration.
For example, Michigan has been a leader in refugee arrivals — federal data show the state has consistently ranked in the top 10 for arrivals since 2012.
Thousands of refugees have come to the state since 2022. In the last fiscal year, the state received more than 3,600 refugees — the highest annual total since 2017, when the first Trump administration began restricting refugees.
Research shows many refugees don’t stay in the state they arrived in, so it's hard to get a good sense of the number of current or former refugees who stayed in Michigan – or how many moved here from other states.
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How many of Michigan’s immigrants are undocumented?
It’s very difficult to pin down the number of people in Michigan without legal immigration status. Several organizations have tried to come up with imperfect estimates by making some assumptions about which people would not have legal status from available Census data.
An estimate from the Migration Policy Institute suggests Michigan had about 91,000 “unauthorized people” between 2015 and 2019, a tiny fragment of the estimated undocumented population in the U.S. in that time.
Other estimates suggest the population could be slightly larger.
One indicator of how small Michigan’s population without legal status might be is the state’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) population.
The DACA program was made to prevent deportations of some people who were brought to the U.S. as children. People are no longer able to gain DACA status, but those who had it before July 2021 are still protected.
Michigan was home to about 4,430 active DACA recipients in the last fiscal year, according to federal data. That’s less than 1% of the total DACA population across the U.S. and in the armed forces. Wisconsin, Indiana and 21 other states had more active DACA recipients than Michigan in that year.There is no path to citizenship through DACA, so some people may choose to leave the country instead of remaining in “legal limbo.” If recipients fail to renew their status, they could face deportation.
Another indicator may be the number of immigrants who were granted asylum in Michigan. Asylees are given permission to stay in the U.S. based on fear of persecution or harm in the country they immigrated from.
Michigan’s asylees were less than 1% of the total number granted asylum nationwide in all but one fiscal year between 2012 and 2023, according to federal data.
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How many seasonal immigrant workers come to Michigan?
Workers for agriculture jobs (H-2A visas)
Agricultural worksites in Michigan employ a lot of temporary immigrant workers through the H-2A visa program. Between 2016 and 2024, the number of jobs federal officials let employers nationwide fill with H-2A workers has nearly doubled — and in Michigan the number has more than tripled.
Michigan Public’s analysis of federal data show the Department of Labor certified over 15,000 agricultural jobs for H-2A workers at worksites in Michigan in each of the last three fiscal years, ranking the state 6th for certifications in the country.
Most of the jobs are general farm labor, offering an average of nearly $19 per hour.
To get an H-2A job certified, employers have to prove that they’ve tried to recruit U.S. citizens and were unable to find enough willing, qualified candidates to do the work. Some critics argue that sometimes agriculture businesses are unable to find enough U.S. workers because they don’t offer high enough wages to entice them.
Not every certification results in a visa being issued. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that in the last few years about 80% of certifications nationwide actually resulted in visa issuances.
Michigan had about 69,000 hired farm laborers — citizen or otherwise — in 2022, according to the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture.
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Workers for non-degree jobs outside of agriculture (H-2B visas)
For a lot of jobs that don’t require degrees, H-2B visa workers fill gaps that employers say they can’t find enough U.S. citizens for.
Most of the work is seasonal, according to the federal data. The largest portion of H-2B certified jobs in Michigan during fiscal year 2024 were in landscaping and groundskeeping. Though there were a lot of other types of jobs as well like cooks, housekeepers and construction workers.
And the range of pay varies greatly depending on the type of work: from a low-end offer of $9.61 per hour for amusement park attendants to a high-end offer of $55 per hour for carpet installers.
Unlike the H-2A visa program for agriculture, H-2B visas are supposed to be limited — with a ceiling of 66,000 visas issued per fiscal year. But national demand for these workers has been so high that the government has raised that ceiling several years in a row, allowing significantly more visas to be issued.
Michigan Public’s analysis of federal data show the number of jobs federal officials allowed H-2B workers to fill in the U.S. increased roughly 62% between fiscal years 2019 and 2024, with over 240,000 jobs certified in 2024.
H-2B certifications for jobs at worksites in Michigan doubled in the same time period, bumping Michigan into the top 10 states for H-2B certifications four years in a row. In each of the last few years, employers asked for about a thousand more H-2B certifications in Michigan than they actually got.
And they likely received fewer workers than the number of jobs certified. Nationally, the number of H-2B visas issued in fiscal year 2024 was just over half of the jobs certified for the program.
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How many people does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest and deport in Michigan?
Detroit is home to the ICE field office that is primarily responsible for arresting and initiating deportation procedures against people without legal immigration status in Michigan and Ohio.
Across both states, ICE data shows the Detroit office arrested over 2,000 people in each fiscal year since 2016. Arrest numbers for each state individually are not available in this public data.
Arrests in Michigan and Ohio make up about 2% of the total nationwide arrests by ICE’s main enforcement division. Over half of the people arrested by this office in the last four fiscal years were not convicted of or facing criminal charges other than immigration violations.
People arrested by ICE are not guaranteed to get deported or detained. Under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. deported record numbers of people — more were “removed” or “returned” to other countries in 2024 than any fiscal year in a decade.
But the Detroit field office did not contribute much to the record deportation numbers. The office’s removals and returns made up less than 1% of the national total in each of the last four fiscal years.
How many people does ICE detain in Michigan?
Most people arrested by ICE are not detained by the agency – there just isn’t enough room.
In Michigan and Ohio, federal data show thousands of arrestees have been let go, but remained under ICE supervision, while waiting for an immigration court to decide if they should get deported.
ICE uses a network of detention centers across the U.S. to hold some of the people who get arrested for immigration violations. Nationally, most of the immigrants held in facilities like these were actually arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), not ICE.
ICE once used a private prison in Baldwin, Michigan that was shuttered in 2022 after the Biden administration ended contracts with for-profit correctional facilities. The American Civil Liberties Union uncovered documents that suggest the administration was considering reopening the GEO Group-owned prison to expand ICE’s detention abilities in 2024.
Four Michigan counties regularly give ICE space to detain people in their locally-run jails: Monroe, Chippewa, St. Clair and Calhoun. These facilities are not solely dedicated to ICE and largely operate like normal jails.
The immigrants detained in these facilities may have come from anywhere in the U.S., as ICE is not required to detain someone near the place they’ve lived or got arrested.
ICE regularly releases data about detention facilities, but the numbers don’t show exactly how many people have been detained in each place. Instead, ICE only shares averages.
In the last fiscal year, Calhoun County Correctional Center had an average daily population of 124 ICE detainees. That is the largest average population any of the four Michigan detention facilities have held for ICE since at least 2021.
On average, ICE detainees stayed in the Calhoun facility for over 50 days. That average is pretty middle of the road for Michigan’s facilities in the last few years. Typically, people remain in detention while they wait for their case to be heard and decided by an immigration judge.
ICE is legally required to detain certain people. Calhoun County Correctional Center had large average daily populations charged with non-immigration crimes or considered a security risk.
But there are many facilities across the U.S. that can and do hold much bigger populations — and some have much longer average lengths of stay.
