ICE Increasingly Targets Undocumented Migrants With No Criminal Record
Emmanuel Martinez, Marianne LeVine and Álvaro Valiño Washington Post
ICE Officer make an arrest. (photo: AP)
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem often touts that ICE officers are arresting the “worst of the worst.” But more than half of those removed from the country since Jan. 20 do not have a criminal conviction. What’s more, as arrests increase, the share of detained migrants with a criminal conviction has been dropping.
DHS’s statistics office has stopped publishing monthly data on arrests and removals. But the Deportation Data Project, a team of lawyers and academics, worked with the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE to obtain the new dataset.
The dataset offers one of the most detailed snapshots yet of whom ICE is arresting and removing as it attempts to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. The Post’s examination of the data shows a substantial increase in arrests, but one that is still significantly below what Trump and his advisers are attempting to do. That could change as Congress prepares to infuse DHS with a massive amount of cash.
The data shows that ICE officers have made more than twice as many arrests compared with the same period last year. And the number of people taken into custody has shot up over the last month in particular. Since May 20, ICE has averaged nearly 1,000 arrests per day, compared to about 600 in the months prior.
That uptick still puts ICE below White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s goal of making a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.
Texas, Florida and California registered the highest number of arrests, but many other states saw substantial increases. In Virginia, ICE officers arrested four times as many people in the first months of the Trump administration as they did over that same period in 2024. That is the biggest percent increase of any state.
A majority of the undocumented immigrants ICE has arrested during the current Trump administration did not have a criminal conviction. About 40 percent did have a conviction, while another 32 percent had pending charges. Details on those charges and convictions were not available.
Over 60 percent of the undocumented immigrants removed from the country did not have a criminal conviction. Nearly 40 percent did have a conviction, though many of their crimes involved nonviolent offenses.
The proportion of detainees with a criminal conviction has fallen in recent months, the data shows. In January, nearly 46 percent of those detained had been convicted of a crime. By June, that number had dropped to 30 percent.
The number of Venezuelan immigrants arrested by ICE quadrupled in the last two years, The Post analysis found. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 486,000 Venezuelans were living as unauthorized immigrants in the United States as of mid-2023. Many had what is known as temporary protected status and were shielded from deportation. But Trump has now canceled that protection for a large number of them.
Mexican migrants, however, accounted for the most arrests.
The administration does not appear on track to deport 1 million migrants this year at its current pace. The data, however, offers a limited picture of the administration’s deportation efforts. DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said that as of Monday, the Trump administration had made more than 273,000 arrests and deported more than 239,000 people. That data is likely to include CBP figures that were not in the dataset analyzed by The Post.
The vast majority of the people removed by ICE are men. They accounted for nearly 90 percent of removals.
In an interview with The Post last month, Trump border czar Tom Homan said that whether the administration can fulfill its goals will depend on funding. Congressional Republicans are now working to approve $170 billion more in spending on immigration enforcement and border security that could result in a dramatic increase in the number of arrests.
Methodology
The Post identified the number of arrests and removals conducted by the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, breaking them down by convictions and charges, location and citizenship.
The Post relied on the Deportation Data Project, which obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE and makes it publicly available online. The data shows every arrest and removal made by ICE – but does not represent actions by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol – and is current as of June 11. The arrest data goes back to September 2023, whereas the removal data includes only 2025.
The arrest data includes information about where ICE made the arrest, such as state, the ICE field office and a landmark site, which is a more specific location and can sometimes denote a county jail, for example. In roughly 20 percent of the data, the state is missing; reporters cleaned many of these records by inferring state based on the location of field offices and landmark sites.
Both the arrest and removal data included duplicate records. The Post dropped duplicated arrest records for individual persons. Reporters also identified instances where a person’s unique identifier had two different birth years, for example. In those cases, reporters kept one of those records, removing the other. In all, reporters removed fewer than 2,000 arrest records, working with 99 percent of the original data, and dropped fewer than 1,500 removal records from an original dataset that included more than 106,000 rows.
