Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg speaking with LPM News on Dec. 17, 2025.(Justin Hicks / LPM )Last year, President Donald Trump was pressuring cities to end policies that protect immigrants living in the country without legal status.In Louisville, Mayor Craig Greenberg responded by agreeing to hono r ICE agents’ requests to keep immigrants locked up in the city jail for up to 48 hours beyond their release date.The policy shift met criticism. But Greenberg promised that he’d looked at data indicating the policy shift would affect less than 100 people per year. The decision, he said at the time, allowed the city to avoid a bigger federal crackdown on immigrants in Louisville and avert Trump’s threat to take away “hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants.”A year later, data show Greenberg was wrong.In the seven months following Greenberg’s policy change in July 2025, more than 300 people in Louisville were subjected to an ICE detainer — the formal request for jail officials to hold someone past their release date. That’s according to data ICE provided to the Deportation Data Project, led by a team of professors, analysts and attorneys and the University of California Berkley and UCLA.Compared with the year prior, when ICE requested detainers on about 163 people, the resulting impact of the policy change already surpassed Greenberg’s estimate in just seven months, the data – analyzed by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting – show.The Deportation Data Project only details ICE detainers through early March 2026, so the full impact of the local policy change cannot yet be known. If the trend continued through this month, the number of people impacted would be at least triple Greenberg’s initial estimate.Now, the ACLU of Kentucky is renewing its longstanding call for Greenberg to buck the Trump administration and undo the policy change he made last summer."I think ultimately the underestimation of the impact was an underestimation of the Trump administration. I think that this is an administration that was very clear – during the election and when they immediately came into power – that they planned to supercharge the deportation machine in this country,” Amber Duke, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky, told KyCIR Thursday.The ACLU of Kentucky, in its own analysis of ICE data, found "the average monthly number of detainer requests was nearly three times as high after Mayor Greenberg changed the ICE policy."Greenberg stands by his decision. His office told KyCIR in a statement:“In cities targeted by the Trump Administration, like Minneapolis, Chicago and L.A., we have seen mass ICE raids tear families apart, lead to indiscriminate deportations, and put lives at risk. Louisville has so far avoided that kind of large-scale enforcement action.After weighing the very real risks on all sides, the Mayor continues to believe this decision offers the best path to keeping tens of thousands of immigrants who call Louisville home out of harm’s way. It was a difficult decision, but in a no-win situation, the Mayor’s responsibility is to pursue the course that protects the greatest number of residents.”How ICE detainers work - and what data revealWhen ICE files a detainer, the agency is asking a jail to give its agents up to two days to come pick up a targeted immigrant. A detainer keeps a person who’d otherwise be freed – like if they posted bail or completed their sentence – behind bars.Before Greenberg changed the policy in July 2025, the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections only gave ICE five to 12 hours’ notice before releasing an immigrant that the federal government wanted to arrest on an immigration violation. Now the jail gives ICE the full 48 hours.At the time, Duke, with the ACLU of Kentucky, condemned the decision.“This move not only undermines the trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement, but it will also further exacerbate the overcrowding and understaffing issues at Louisville Metro Department of Corrections that have led to more than 20 deaths in the past three years,” she said last July.Duke detailed the ACLU’s analysis of ICE data in a press release this week, saying they found that in the 19 months before Greenberg’s policy change, ICE filed an average of 17 detainers per month in Louisville. In the seven months after Greenberg’s policy change, the average went up to 49 detainers per month.The ACLU also found that Louisville's jail officials declined about one-third of ICE detainer requests before August 2025, but after Greenberg’s policy change, the number of declined requests fell to about 1%.KyCIR reviewed the same dataset the ACLU reviewed but limited the time span, comparing the number of detainers filed during the year before Greenberg’s policy change with the number of detainers sent in the seven months following the change.From August 2024 through July 2025, data show ICE filed 187 detainers on 163 people, the data show. Then, from Aug. 2025 through Feb. 2026, ICE filed 334 detainers on 306 people.Greenberg expected fewer than 100 additional people per year would be affected by the detainer policy change. But in just seven months, ICE targeted 143 more people with detainers.Just because ICE files a detainer on someone doesn’t mean they’ll be taken into federal custody. But most are. Out of about 330 ICE detainers filed in Louisville between August 2025 and February 2026, at least 249 led to ICE taking custody of someone, the data show. More than 150 of those detainers ultimately led to a deportation.This report is updated. ...read more read less