Since their peak less than three years ago, opioid overdose deaths dropped nearly by half as of October, according to a Stateline analysis. The drop comes as a shrinking fentanyl supply has made the drug weaker and less deadly and volunteer efforts get more people into treatment.

The weaker fentanyl tracks to a crackdown on materials used to make fentanyl in China around the time U.S. deaths started dropping in 2023. Some experts see it as a welcome, but possibly temporary, break for states in a scourge that boosted crime as people who are using the drugs sometimes fall into homelessness and steal to support fentanyl habits.

The numbers and rates of opioid overdose deaths fell for all races between 2023 and 2026, according to more detailed data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by Stateline. That’s in contrast to an earlier trend from 2019 to 2023, when rates dropped only among white people and rose sharply among Black and Indigenous Americans.

Ohio had the nation’s largest decrease since mid-2023, when the nation’s opioid overdose deaths peaked. Ohio has seen fewer deaths but more risky behavior lately as fentanyl supplies dry up and people turn to substitutes tainted by animal tranquilizers.

Ohio is seeing a difference in the bottom line, said Erin Reed, director of RecoveryOhio, the state agency charged with reducing overdose deaths.

“We’re seeing things you would expect — like reductions in emergency department visits and reductions in Medicaid costs,” Reed said. “But we’re also seeing a positive impact on violent crime and recidivism, and I think this is really, really encouraging. At the end of the day, people want to be safe.”

Sarah Beckman, 36, stopped using illicit drugs 11 years ago when she learned she was pregnant with her first child. Now she works through Hamilton County’s Quick Response Team to help Ohio residents who use fentanyl.

When overdoses peaked a few years ago, the team started spending more time talking to people after overdoses.

“We saw overdoses were going up and up, and going out two days a week was not enough. We expanded it to full time,” Beckman said. “That window is so small. It has to be kind of a perfect storm for an individual to be, like, ‘OK, I’m ready.’”

Even if people aren’t ready for treatment, kindness can help build trust and prevent some of the thefts and arrests that lead to police involvement, as it did for her when she stole to get money for drugs and was charged with resisting arrest, she said.

“When you’re in the midst of addiction you need help with everything. For us it’s just meeting people where they are and saying, ‘Hey, are you hungry? Do you have enough clothes?’” Beckman said. “You’re showing consistency and empathy, and by doing that you can slowly move someone closer toward accepting overdose prevention materials or hopefully, eventually, treatment.”

Nationally there were 46,066 opioid overdose deaths in the year ending with October, barely more than half the peak of 86,075 in June 2023 and the lowest since April 2017. The numbers, often delayed because of the process of determining overdose deaths, were released this month based on information available March 1 by the federal National Vital Statistics System.

Deaths fell the most in Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and Florida since June 2023, but increased in Alaska, Arizona and Nevada.

In Ohio, annual deaths fell 63% from about 4,300 in June 2023 to about 1,600 as of October 2025.

As in many other states, deaths in Ohio started falling before 2023, but then dropped more sharply — 34% in that year alone, said Reed.

Arizona and Nevada, however, saw deaths increase since the national peak in 2023. Arizona’s border crossings with Mexico are among the largest fentanyl smuggling points in the country, with fentanyl traffic dominated by the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico. One Arizona crossing, the Port of Lukeville, was the site of the largest fentanyl seizure in U.S. Customs and Border Protection history: 4 million fentanyl pills hidden in a trailer brought to the border by a 20-year-old U.S. citizen in July 2024.

The state’s notorious summer heat exacerbates overdose deaths, according to recent research.

Plentiful supply from the border may help explain continued increases in Arizona, said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association, a public health workers organization.

Political infighting over how to spend the state government’s share of $1.2 billion in opioid settlement money hasn’t helped, he said. The state attorney general, governor and legislature have gone to court over plans to use some of the money to balance the state budget.

“Many other states are way ahead of Arizona when it comes to distributing the state portion of the opioid settlement dollars,” Humble said. “It could be there are fewer interventions because the state dollars are locked up. There’s this dispute in Arizona over who gets to decide. Many other states are not having this jurisdictional issue.”

On the national stage, opioid overdose deaths fell across demographic groups. Even older Americans, whose overdose death numbers had surged earlier even as they fell for other groups, saw a 25% decline from 2023 to 2025, about half the national decrease, according to the Stateline analysis.

In a sign of a weaker fentanyl supply, the Drug Enforcement Administration said in December that 29% of the pills it seized in fiscal 2025 contained a lethal dose of fentanyl, down from 76% in fiscal 2023.

“These reductions in potency and purity correlate with a decline in synthetic opioid deaths,” the DEA said.

Keith Humphreys, a health policy professor at Stanford University who testified to the U.S. Senate in 2023 about increases in accidental overdose deaths among older adults, told Stateline that a “fentanyl supply shock” originating in China made fentanyl supplies weaker. That would include fentanyl-tainted cocaine, which had caused many deaths among older Black men, Humphreys said.

“This likely includes some long-term cocaine users who had the bad luck to get cocaine that had fentanyl in it,” Humphreys said in an interview. White women are more likely to overdose on prescription drugs in order to commit suicide, a trend that would be less likely to be affected by fentanyl supply, he added.

Humphreys and a team of other researchers, in a Science magazine report published in January, found a “drought” of fentanyl that could be traced on the social media platform Reddit.

Elevated mentions of a “drought” started in May 2023, nearly the same time as overdoses began to drop, their research found. Also, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported decreasing potency in seized fentanyl and fewer seizures, both indicating a shortage of supply.

“Drug dealers often adapt to supply shortages by lowering purity more than raising prices,” the report stated. The likely reason: China cracked down on source chemicals for making illicit fentanyl. Such “precursor” chemicals typically arrive from China and are processed in Mexico before being smuggled into the U.S. as illicit fentanyl.

“Actions by the government of China that resulted in greater scrutiny of production and export of precursor chemicals, including the removal of online advertisements and several marketplaces,” may have been what caused the drought in fentanyl and thus saved lives, the report concluded.

The DEA concluded that Mexican fentanyl producers were cutting potency because they were having a hard time finding source chemicals from China, the report noted. That makes it likely supply is the biggest reason for the drop in deaths, not enhanced U.S. border searches or other actions such as the Trump administration’s attacks on drug boats off the South American coast. Those boats are typically used to transport cocaine rather than fentanyl.

Data shows a similar drop in overdose deaths in Canada, where fentanyl supplies are usually produced from Chinese chemicals inside the country rather than smuggled in. That’s another reason to suspect that China’s crackdown affected both countries, despite differing policies and law enforcement strategies.

In their Science article, Humphreys and the other researchers noted that the recent decline in deaths offers the chance to prepare for future opioid-related problems.

“The incentive to restore the fentanyl trade will persist as long as there is demand for the drug,” the authors wrote. “It may be wise to use the current drought as an opportunity to ramp up the prevention and treatment programs that have evidence of decreasing demand.”

There have been some more recent upticks in death numbers.

Colorado saw an increase in synthetic opioid overdose deaths starting in late 2024, according to a Common Sense Institute report released this month. The institute is nonpartisan but has ties to the Republican Party, and concluded the state needs stiffer penalties for fentanyl possession and distribution, similar to Texas law. Opioid overdose deaths in Colorado are down 9% since the national peak in 2023, according to the Stateline analysis.

In Ohio, the recent trend among people who use fentanyl is to find pills spiked with an animal tranquilizer that causes severe addiction, said Beckman, of the Hamilton County Quick Response Team. Three recent clients survived overdoses but required emergency treatment, she said.

“We can educate people in the community: ‘Hey, your drugs are not what you thought they were, that’s why you’re experiencing all these weird side effects,’” Beckman said. “These substances are so severe that a traditional detox hasn’t been able to handle them.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now reject at least some federal vaccine guidance as the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to de-emphasize the importance of childhood vaccinations under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., according to research by KFF, a nonprofit health policy organization based in California and Washington, D.C. 

The tally as of March 10 reflects states that have announced they will go their own way on childhood vaccines since last May, when Kennedy began to make changes to the vaccine schedule. Those changes culminated with a reduction in recommended routine childhood vaccinations, from 13 to 7, as of January. 

New state-by-state recommendations reflect a partisan divide, as all states with Democratic governors have rejected federal childhood vaccine guidance while many Republican states have not. 

Virginia announced in February that it would not follow CDC guidelines, a change after the inauguration of Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who took over after a Republican predecessor. Spanberger had campaigned on the issue, saying she would not support a rollback of childhood vaccinations.

In Florida, the state Senate passed a bill March 9 making it easier for parents to let their children go unvaccinated, though state House leaders have said they will not consider a similar bill despite support for it from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

In Louisiana, the state has adopted a policy of not promoting vaccines or holding clinics. Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who reluctantly agreed to Kennedy’s confirmation despite objecting to his views on vaccines, is facing a primary fight. 

Fifteen Democrat-led states sued Kennedy in federal court in February, seeking a reversal of the new vaccine guidelines. A preliminary hearing is scheduled May 29.

Some states have created formal alliances to share health information. The Northeast Public Health Collaborative, composed of Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York state, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and New York City, said in January it will continue following guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics instead of the federal government.

The American Academy of Pediatrics released its immunization schedule for 2026, which kept in place the schedule as it was before HHS’s overhaul. Twelve medical professional organizations endorsed the academy’s schedule. 

And governors of 14 states have formed another alliance to share public health information, including on vaccines. The updated CDC guidance “creates confusion and introduces unnecessary barriers for families who want to protect their children from serious illness,” said the Governors Public Health Alliance in a January news release. The governors are all Democrats, though the group says it is nonpartisan.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Pressured by businesses on the importance of immigrant labor, some Republican states are backing off plans to require all employers to check for legal employment status before hiring workers.

State and federal legislation to require that employers use E-Verify, a federal system to check legal status, has been limited this year as a push grows from business interests that say checking status could hurt state economies. Business groups have cited the cost of complying with the laws and the potential loss of crucial immigrant workers who don’t have legal work authorization.

Millions of worksites around the country use E-Verify to ensure new hires are legal to work in the United States, but it isn’t required in all states or for every industry. Going after employers has not been as popular with Republicans as immigration enforcement aimed at detaining and deporting people living here illegally.

In Idaho, for instance, legislation that would require all employers to use E-Verify, crafted with help from the conservative Heritage Foundation, is awaiting state House consideration — while a more limited mandate for large state and local government contractors passed the state Senate Feb. 19.

“I think we should tread lightly, and private businesses should not be enforcement agencies,” said state Sen. Mark Harris, a Republican and rancher who sponsored the less-stringent bill, on the Senate floor before the vote.

Idaho Republican state Sen. Brian Lenney, who voted for the bill, spoke resentfully of business leaders who came to the state Capitol to lobby against the broader mandate for all employers to use E-Verify.

“There were men in suits holding a press conference downstairs to let the world know and tell Idaho which industries cannot survive without illegal labor,” Lenney said before the vote. “They’re trying to protect a system that keeps human beings cheap, compliant and silent. … Is this bill making a dent, like it should? Not really.”

An industry-funded report said a sharp drop in unauthorized labor from deportations could cost the state economy billions of dollars and reduce state tax revenue by almost $400 million. The report, funded by the Idaho Alliance for a Legal Workforce and prepared by regional economists, emphasized the importance of immigrants to certain industries: As much as 90% of the workforce in dairy production is foreign-born, for example, and half of those individuals might not be authorized to work in the U.S.

There were 21 states with E-Verify requirements for contracts or business licenses as of 2024, federal data showed. Seventeen states had pending legislation to begin or expand E-Verify mandates as of Feb. 5, said Mick Bullock, a spokesperson for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Some bills have not progressed after business opposition, such as an E-Verify mandate in Kansas opposed by the Kansas Chamber and the League of Kansas Municipalities. The chamber said the bill “would create an aggressive, invasive, and costly system of employment verification on all Kansas businesses” in 2025 testimony.

“The goal of this bill is to prevent illegal immigration, however with the bill’s broad definitions and severe penalties this legislation would suppress business operations,” the chamber wrote in submitted testimony.

Another example of a limited E-Verify mandate is a recent Ohio law. It applies only to nonresidential construction, despite testimony about illegal labor in residential construction. After Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the measure in December, it takes effect March 20.

An earlier version of the same Ohio bill passed the state House in 2024 but did not pass the state Senate. In a hearing at the time, Richard Ochocki, an organizer for the state plumbers and pipefitters union, said he spent three hours at an apartment and condo construction site in Columbus without finding even one person with the legal work status required to join the union.

“The flow of undocumented workers to Ohio has been steadily increasing over my five and a half years as an organizer. I have personally encountered undocumented workers in Cleveland, Canton, Ashland, Lima, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus,” said Ochocki, speaking in favor of E-Verify, in prepared remarks.

Madeline Zavodny, a professor at the University of North Florida who has researched the effects of E-Verify on the labor market, said exemptions for short-term work such as agriculture or small business is common, but limiting it to part of one industry such as nonresidential construction is unusual.

“The more limited the law is, the less impact it would have,” Zavodny said. “And nonresidential construction may be heavily unionized in Ohio such that there’s not a lot of unauthorized workers anyway. Unauthorized workers are often day laborers who work primarily in residential construction, not nonresidential.”

Meg Rietschlin, majority owner of a construction firm that bids on schools, roads, culverts and other nonresidential construction projects in rural Crawford County, Ohio, said she requires her workers to have a valid driver’s license, which should be enough to show they have legal status. An E-Verify mandate would drive her out of business because of the additional paperwork, she wrote in 2024 testimony.

“If you inundate me with the requirement to collect so much information, I will cease to be,” Rietschlin wrote. “This proposed law is meant to drive the small contractor out of public works opportunities.”

A report Zavodny co-authored in 2015 found E-Verify mandates appeared to help some workers who compete with unauthorized workers, such as Mexican immigrants who became citizens and U.S.-born Hispanic people, but did not measurably help U.S.-born non-Hispanic white people.

A 2020 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no evidence that E-Verify mandates improve the native-born labor market in general, and no evidence that people without work authorization moved away because of the mandates. Unauthorized workers may move from large businesses to small businesses that are less likely to comply with the mandates, the paper concluded.

As the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown ramped up last year, restaurants and construction lost the largest number of immigrant laborers compared with 2024, according to a Stateline analysis of federal data. Landscaping, building services and warehousing industries also lost tens of thousands of laborers.

Rick Naerebout, who represents about 350 Idaho dairy farmers as CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, said his members depend on unauthorized labor to run their farms that together produce more than 18 billion pounds of milk in 2025, behind only California and Wisconsin.

Idaho farms have not seen large-scale raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Naerebout said, though there was one last year in South Dakota and one in New Mexico in June, among others. Naerebout said he believes President Donald Trump has paused most ICE raids on agriculture and tourism, as has been reported by The New York Times and Stateline.

Idaho should limit E-Verify mandates to government as the state Senate bill would do, and shouldn’t pass more stringent mandates as the other bills would do, Naerebout added.

“The president couldn’t be more clear that he wants there to be space for critical industries like agriculture to try and get to where we find the solution,” Naerebout said. “The irony is Idaho voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, and you’ve got Idaho Republicans now saying what the president’s doing isn’t good enough.”

Among other states, Tennessee has a broad E-Verify mandate for all businesses with at least 35 employees, though the exact number of employees has shifted over the years. Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a law effective in 2023 that lowered the threshold from 50 to 35, and one proposed bill this year could shift it back to 50 employees.

The mandate has faced business opposition but “other than a brief period of adjustment implementation has gone very smoothly,” Republican Lt. Gov. Randy McNally said in a statement to Stateline. McNally and other state officials have collaborated with the Trump administration on a package of proposed state legislation this year, including making E-Verify mandatory for state and local government hires.

Florida also has an E-Verify mandate for employers with 25 or more employees, with a bill under consideration to expand it to all employers. It passed the state House in January and is now in a state Senate committee.

In Democratic-led California, employers starting this month must notify employees about their rights under state law, including a prohibition on using E-Verify in a discriminatory way to screen only some employees. A bill in Democratic-led New York, with 12 Democratic sponsors, would prohibit use of E-Verify to screen job applicants or check on existing employees, which is  already prohibited by federal law. E-Verify can only be used legally after a job offer and before an employee has started work.

Meanwhile, some conservative-leaning states are moving to tighten rules. An Indiana bill would hold public works subcontractors accountable as part of an E-Verify mandate for public agency contracts and a West Virginia bill would require all employers to use E-Verify.

Federal legislation to mandate E-Verify for all employers has bogged down in recent years. A Senate bill last year did not progress beyond a committee, and a similar House bill bogged down in 2018.

Last year, Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie introduced a bill that would require E-Verify for federal contractors only, saying it was “an area where mandatory E-Verify makes clear sense” in prepared testimony.

Mackenzie said he had sponsored an E-Verify law as a state lawmaker in 2019, and that it “has ensured there is a lawful workforce in the construction industry in my home state of Pennsylvania, protecting American workers from unfair competition, providing a level playing field for businesses, and helping to confirm all appropriate taxes are paid.”

Mackenzie’s bill on federal contractors had a committee hearing in January, during which California Democratic U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren said the bill would need an exemption for agriculture, since the government buys food and milk produced by undocumented workers for the military and schools on military bases.

“If we don’t exempt ag, we will have a very serious problem throughout the federal government, especially in our military that relies on ag products in feeding our soldiers,” Lofgren said. Her request to amend the bill was voted down.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Despite immigration detention numbers receding from recent highs and even as conservative judges are opting to release more detainees by rejecting President Donald Trump’s mass detention policy, tools for detainees to seek release or appeal cases are disappearing. 

A proposed federal rule will make it harder to appeal immigration cases nationally. And a federal appeals court ruling stops immigrants from requesting release on legal grounds in three Southern states if they entered the country illegally, no matter how long they’ve been here. 

As of late January, there were 70,766 people in immigration detention, up from about 40,000 at the start of the second Trump administration, with about 74% having no criminal convictions. (The number of detainees declined to 68,289 as of Feb. 7 amid increasing releases of immigration prisoners by federal judges, even many appointed by the Trump administration.)

This month’s court ruling in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which affects immigrants held in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, is a victory for a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy set last July. It requires detention without bond for many immigrants who arrived at the border without permission, even if they had been paroled with a court date. 

It comes as habeas petitions from people claiming illegal detention skyrocket — from a few dozen a week in early 2025 to thousands a week recently, according to a ProPublica report. The largest numbers of cases are in Texas, California, Minnesota, Florida and Georgia. 

Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration attorney in Missouri and second vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she believes hundreds of other federal judges disagree with the Feb. 6 appeals court order. 

‘Mandatory detention’

The ruling found that a landmark Clinton-era immigration law, called The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), “unambiguously provides for mandatory detention” for people who crossed the border illegally. 

A dissenting judge, Dana Douglas, wrote that drafters of that law ”would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people. For almost thirty years there was no sign anyone thought it had done so.” 

Sharma-Crawford said the ruling would likely be challenged, but that it may be too late for people who may give up under the stress of detention, and agree to deportation. 

“I have a client in detention who’s been here [in the United States] 30 years, no criminal history, and has a family,” Sharma-Crawford said in an interview. “In the past the individual would be eligible for a bond hearing and be able to fight their immigration case in due course. These people are not accustomed to being in jail.”  

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised the court decision on social media, saying “activist judges have ordered the release of alien after alien based on the false claim that DHS was breaking the law” and said the ruling proved the administration “was right all along.”

Another obstacle for detainees

Similarly, a new rule on the federal Board of Immigration Appeals makes it harder for immigrants to appeal cases like denial of asylum in immigration court.   

Open for comment until it takes effect March 9, the rule shrinks the deadline to appeal a decision to 10 days from 30 days, and the board will automatically deny a case unless a majority of the board votes to hear it.

Immigration attorney Raul Natera of Fort Worth, Texas, who posted a comment critical of the proposed rule, told Stateline it would be a “flat-out assault on due process,” because the Department of Justice could appoint board members who will not vote to hear appeals. Last year the Trump administration fired board members who had been appointed during the Biden administration. 

“Judges can make wrong decisions. If we do not ensure that those decisions can be reviewed, then there is no point to the judicial system in this country,” Natera said.

The Department of Justice argues in its proposed rule that denying appeals in most cases will speed up the process and clear a backlog of immigration cases.

Others disagree. The new rule will increase strain on courts if immigrants can no longer appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals and instead must file more lawsuits with appeals courts, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.

“The federal courts are already buckling under the weight of all these habeas petitions [alleging illegal detention],” Bush-Joseph said. “It’s a huge lift to be litigating all this.”

Sharma-Crawford called both measures a “numbers game” to get deportation numbers up before court challenges can make a difference. 

“All these things don’t happen quickly, and people will suffer while litigation is ongoing,” she said. “How much travesty and injustice is going to occur while the courts grapple with the legality of what the administration is doing?”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

U.S. jobs increased by 130,000 in January, buoyed by hires in health care, social assistance and construction.

But in another sign of anemic hiring last year, estimates for 2025 were revised down by more than a million jobs to a level of low growth rarely seen outside of recessions. 

The revisions show the United States added only 181,000 jobs last year — the first year of the new Trump administration — one of the lowest increases ever outside recessions. 

Jobs dropped in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and in 2008-2009 in the Great Recession, but otherwise the last time was a lower increase in jobs was in 2003, when they rose 124,000 after two years of decreases, during a period labeled a “jobless recovery” by economists.  

Economist Claudia Sahm, who had predicted 2025 would be “a year without jobs, but no recession” before the annual revisions based on more complete data, said Wednesday that “the downward revisions are huge” in an X post.

The new revisions changed the most for January 2025, which went from a gain of 111,000 to a loss of 48,000 jobs. Only one month, October, saw an upward revision: A reported loss of 173,000 jobs was trimmed to a loss of 140,000 jobs. There are now four months of job losses reported last year, up from three. 

Overall, the number of total U.S. jobs at the end of the year was revised down by 1,029,000, from a little more than 159.5 million to a little less than 158.5 million. 

State by state jobs estimates for January are not yet available. 

There have been about 29,000 layoffs announced so far in 2026,according to notices tracked by WARN Tracker. They include 7,705 layoffs in California, 6,109 in New Jersey, 3,999 in Pennsylvania, 3,483 in Washington state and 2,607 in Texas. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A demonstrator waves a red cloth as hundreds gather after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good through her car window Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026 near Portland Avenue and 34th Street. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Despite the high-profile U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Minnesota, ICE arrests were down slightly in January compared to December, according to new data. 

Immigrant detention nationwide also reached a new high in January, and a growing percentage — nearly three-quarters — of people in detention have no criminal convictions.

ICE arrested 36,579 people in  January compared with December (37,842); the numbers haven’t changed much since October (36,621), according to new estimates from a Syracuse University professor.

The number of people in immigration detention reached 70,766 as of Jan. 24, a new high, according to a different report by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, also at Syracuse University.  

The number in detention has gone up steadily from about 40,000 at the start of the second Trump administration, and the latest number is the largest since the organization, known as TRAC, began tracking immigrant detention in 2019. 

Of those detainees 74.2%, or 52,504, had no criminal convictions, up from 70.4% in June.  

“Since the summer, nearly all of the growth in ICE detention has come from people without criminal convictions or charges — an area of tremendous sustained growth that contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative that they are focused on the worst of the worst,” Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University who researches immigration enforcement, wrote in a substack posting. 

Kocher is a former researcher for TRAC but is no longer associated with the organization and created estimates of monthly arrests based on detention check-ins. 

Detention facilities in Texas had the largest number of detainees, 18,684, followed by Louisiana (8,207), California (6,422), Florida (5,187) and Georgia (4,178) as of Jan. 24. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

A sign at a University of Utah health clinic warns visitors about the spread of measles. Under the Trump administration, federal health officials have cut back the number of recommended vaccines, and more states are offering exemptions for parents who don't want to vaccinate children entering public schools. (Photo by McKenzie Romero/Utah News Dispatch)

States that were leaders in childhood vaccination before the pandemic are among those losing ground as exemptions and unfounded skepticism take hold, encouraged by the Trump administration’s stance under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Expanded exemptions for parents are likely to drop both Mississippi and West Virginia from the top national rankings they held before the pandemic, according to a Stateline analysis of federal data. Other states like Florida, Idaho, Louisiana and Montana also are pushing the envelope on vaccine choice.

At least 33 states were below herd immunity in the 2024-25 school year, compared with 28 states before the pandemic in 2018-2019, the analysis found. Herd immunity refers to the percentage of people who must be vaccinated or otherwise immune from an infectious disease to limit its spread.

Research shows that in the case of measles — a highly contagious disease — states need to maintain at least 95% vaccination rates to protect people who can’t get vaccinated. Other diseases have similar herd immunity rates. People who can’t be vaccinated might include infants too young to receive certain vaccines and those with underlying health conditions.

Misinformation and expressions of distrust from influential leaders have an effect on parents, doctors say, as do new state exemptions making it easier for families to avoid the vaccines.

Some people who never questioned vaccines before notice a national debate and get confused, said Dr. Patricia Tibbs, a pediatrician in rural Mississippi and president of the Mississippi chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. New religious exemptions may already be fueling an increase in pertussis, also known as whooping cough, in Mississippi, she said.

“If they hear something about it in the news, then it must be right, they think,” Tibbs said. “We’re just following the guidelines and informing patients that this is a scientific discussion. Nothing has changed about the science. But people who don’t know science are making decisions.”

Under Kennedy’s leadership, federal support for vaccination has continued to slide, and many states have joined a movement to set their own course by following more science-based recommendations from doctors. On Jan. 26 the Governors Public Health Alliance, a group of 15 Democratic governors, endorsed child and adolescent vaccination standards from the American Academy of Pediatrics rather than the federal government.

Federal health officials in Trump’s administration have cut back the number of recommended vaccines. The chair of a vaccine advisory committee, pediatric cardiologist Kirk Milhoan, suggested in a Jan. 22 podcast that individual freedom was more important than protecting community health with vaccines, even for measles and polio.

New leading states

Before the pandemic, Mississippi and West Virginia had the highest kindergarten vaccination rates in the nation, according to the Stateline analysis. About 99% of kindergartners in each state had their required vaccinations before entering public schools in the 2018-2019 school year.

In the latest statistics for the 2024-25 year, Connecticut gained the No. 1 spot, followed by New York and Maine. Those states have reined in exemptions to school vaccine requirements, while Mississippi and West Virginia have begun to allow more exemptions.

West Virginia didn’t report vaccinations to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the 2024-25 school year. The state department of health told Stateline the data wouldn’t be available until later this year.

But the state is likely to be pushed out of the top 10. Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey issued an executive order a year ago giving parents the right to ask for religious exemptions. To date, the state has approved 693 such requests for the current school year, spokesperson Gailyn Markham wrote in an email. That alone is enough to shift the state’s ranking significantly.

Stateline computed an average of required kindergarten vaccination rates to compare states. The analysis uses 2018-19 as a pre-pandemic baseline because a large number of states did not report the information in 2019-20 in the chaos that followed the early COVID-19 spikes and school closings.

A January study published by JAMA Pediatrics found increased vaccination rates among kindergartners in states that had repealed nonmedical exemptions, suggesting the repeals “played a role in maintaining vaccination coverage in repeal states during a period of heightened vaccine hesitancy.”

Requirements and exemptions

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require students to have certain vaccines before attending public school. They also all allow exemptions for children who cannot receive vaccinations for medical reasons, and most states allow nonmedical exemptions, often for religious or sometimes personal reasons. But Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has proposed dropping all requirements, and Idaho enacted a 2025 law allowing vaccination exemptions for any reason. Idaho had the lowest rate of kindergarten vaccination, about 80% in the 2024-25 school year before the law took effect in July last year.

Louisiana in 2024 enacted a law dropping COVID-19 vaccine requirements for public schools, and the state has opted to halt publicity about flu vaccination and end public vaccine clinics.

A Florida bill that progressed out of committee in January would maintain school vaccine requirements but expand exemptions to include “conscience” as well as medical and religious reasons.

Dr. Jennifer Takagishi, a Tampa pediatrician and vice president of the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the organization opposes both the DeSantis administration proposal to revoke vaccine requirements and the bill that would expand exemptions. Florida’s kindergarten vaccination rate fell from 94% before the pandemic to about 90% in 2024-25, according to the Stateline analysis.

“They’re ignoring the 90% of their constituents who want vaccines and want to stay safe,” said Takagishi. “The legislators are listening to the louder voice of those who want to oppose vaccines instead of the majority. We also know that there are teachers in the school system and school nurses who are fighting this because it puts them at risk.”

All states except Montana report kindergarten vaccine statistics to the federal government. Montana enacted a 2021 law making vaccine status private and unavailable for statistical reports, over the objections of medical experts. The law also made medical exemptions easier for families who think their children have been injured by vaccines.

Dr. Lauren Wilson, a pediatrician and then-vice president of the Montana chapter of the American Association of Pediatrics, said in a hearing that the law would make “vaccination information unavailable for responding to and mitigating public health emergencies.”

“Vaccines have saved millions of lives. I personally have seen cases of tetanus, pertussis, measles and meningitis and the tragedies that these mean for families,” Wilson said in her testimony.

A 2023 court order forced Mississippi to accept religious exemptions. West Virginia allows religious exemptions following the governor’s order last year.

Tibbs, who practices pediatrics in rural Jones County, Mississippi, said she has been seeing more pertussis than usual, and thinks vaccine exemptions could be a factor.

In Mississippi, which reported 394 religious exemptions for the 2024-25 school year, overall rates remained high enough that year, at about 97.8%, to ensure “herd immunity” in most cases.

Mississippi has granted 617 religious vaccination exemptions for kindergartners this school year, about 1.8% of the class, according to Amanda Netadj, immunizations director for the state health department. About 96.3% of kindergartners have all required vaccinations this year.

But the state’s whooping cough cases last year were the highest they’d been in at least decade, and in September health officials announced an infant had died of the disease — the state’s first whooping cough death in 13 years.

“We do have a lot of people getting the religious exemption,” Tibbs said. ”But still, on any given day, the majority of my patients will still get their vaccines. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the numbers stay high enough.”

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.