Photo Credit: Getty Images
President Donald Trump has pledged to deport “the worst of the worst.” He frequently speaks at public appearances about the countless “dangerous criminals” — among them murderers, rapists and child predators — from around the world he says entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration. He promises to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history to protect law-abiding citizens from the violent threats he says they pose.
But government data around ongoing detentions tells a different story.
There has been an increase of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Trump began his second term, with reports of raids across the country. Yet the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes — a stark contrast to the chilling nightmare Trump describes to support his border security agenda.
“There’s a deep disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-faculty director of the UCLA Law School’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “This administration, and also in the prior Trump administration, they consistently claim to be going after the worst of the worst and just talk about immigration enforcement as though it is all about going after violent, dangerous people with extensive criminal histories. And yet overwhelmingly, it’s people they’re targeting for arrest who have no criminal history of any kind.”
A look at the numbers
The latest ICE statistics show that as of June 29, there were 57,861 people detained by ICE, 41,495 — 71.7% — of whom had no criminal convictions. That includes 14,318 people with pending criminal charges and 27,177 who are subject to immigration enforcement, but have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.
Each detainee is assigned a threat level by ICE on a scale of 1 to 3, with one being the highest. Those without a criminal record are classified as having “no ICE threat level.” As of June 23, the latest data available, 84% of people detained at 201 facilities nationwide were not given a threat level. Another 7% had been graded as a level 1 threat, 4% were level 2 and 5% were level 3.
“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, called the assessment that ICE isn’t targeting immigrants with a criminal record “false” and said that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has directed ICE “to target the worst of the worst—including gang members, murderers, and rapists.” She counted detainees with convictions, as well as those with pending charges, as “criminal illegal aliens.”
Nonpublic data obtained by the Cato Institute shows that as of June 14, 65% of the more than 204,000 people processed into the system by ICE since the start of fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1, 2024, had no criminal convictions. Of those with convictions, only 6.9% had committed a violent crime, while 53% had committed nonviolent crimes that fell into three main categories — immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.
