ICE Detention Stays at Georgia Facilities

Limitations

Calendar years, not federal fiscal years: `year` and `month` come from `stay_book_in_date_time` (the date the stay began), so figures here will NOT match ICE's own or DDP's published FY totals (federal FY runs October 1 - September 30). Coverage is the release window 2022-10-01 through 2026-08-06: calendar 2022 is October-December only and 2026 stops on 6 August, so both end years are partial and a year-over-year chart dips at both ends. Stays that began BEFORE the window (1,747 Georgia stays by longest facility, reaching back to 2004) are the left-censored residue of detentions still open when the FOIA window opened, not a series, and are dropped. A stay is one uninterrupted period in ICE detention, possibly across several facilities (transfers do not end a stay), and this topic locates it at the facility where the person spent the LONGEST: Georgia holds 32,988 stays by first facility, 70,116 by longest and 46,097 by last facility, so a 'detentions in Georgia' figure depends on the reading and only the longest-facility reading is published here. A stay that begins in Georgia frequently does not end there - 47% of stays whose first facility was in Georgia ended in another state, chiefly Louisiana and Texas (Rapides, Evangeline; El Paso, Cameron) - while people first booked in Fulton are largely moved on to Stewart and Folkston. Geography is the DETENTION FACILITY'S county, never the person's residence: Stewart, Charlton, Irwin, Fulton and Clayton hold ICE facilities (Floyd and Cobb county jails also hold ICE detainees for short periods), and nothing here says where the detained person lived. 99.98% of Georgia stays resolved to a county (16 state-only, at a facility with no county in the source), so county rows sum to slightly less than the state total. Disclosure control (the platform's own rule; the source has none): county rows are annual totals with every categorical pinned to `all` (`month` and `citizenship_country` are published at state grain only), on a complete 159-county x 5-year grid; any county count below 5 - ZERO INCLUDED - is withheld as NULL, with complementary suppression so a withheld cell cannot be recovered by subtraction. A county NULL therefore means 'fewer than five, possibly none', never a real zero; state rows are complete and a state 0 is a real zero. At county grain num_stays - num_stays_ended (the still-open count) is published by implication even when small; it is a count of a category at a large facility, not an identity, and the state series publishes it directly. CENSORING: `avg_stay_length_days` averages ENDED stays only (8.2% of Georgia stays in the window were still open at extraction, 24% of those that began in 2026), so the most recent months are biased short - the long stays still in progress are missing from their book-in month - and an apparent fall (or rise, as they close) in average length near the end of the window can be a censoring artifact rather than a change in practice. `num_stays - num_stays_ended` is the open count in each cell. `demographic` is ICE's own gender determination (`Male` / `Female`), not self-reported; ICE's `Unknown` counts toward `all` only, so male + female is at most `all`. `citizenship_country` names the 22 countries most frequent in Georgia records; everything else is `other`. `arresting_agency_group` is the Deportation Data Project's program-group flag for the arrest that led to the stay (ICE vs CBP), not an ICE field; a NULL flag is published as `unknown`. `release_reason` collapses ICE's release labels to six outcome groups plus `still_detained` (no book-out by 2026-08-06).