Donald Trump and his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem vowed to find and arrest “the worst of the worst” and “violent” criminal offenders among the immigrants they rounded up with a surge of federal officers into U.S. cities over the last several months.
Those high-profile immigration enforcement operations in major cities across the country locked up thousands. But the vast majority have not been convicted of any crime, and more than half do not have any criminal record whatsoever.
Less than 30 percent of those arrested in those operations had prior criminal convictions, according to an analysis fromThe New York Times using arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. An even smaller share of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime.
The most common convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.
The data closely mirrors national trends in immigration arrest data through Trump’s mass deportation campaign, with the share of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody with criminal convictions plummeting to just 28 percent in October – down from 46 percent at the beginning of the year.
Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., in August, surging federal agents and National Guard troops into the nation’s capital. Trump falsely claimed that the city had been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” But more than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in that sweep did not have a prior criminal record, according to the government’s own data.
ICE arrested more than 1,100 people in D.C. from August through mid-October, more than triple the amount of ICE arrests in the city within the first seven months of the year.
But that spike saw a sixfold increase of arrests of immigrants without any criminal record at all, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
In Chicago, only 15 percent of immigrants detained in the weeks-long “Operation Midway Blitz” surge led by Customs and Border Protection had a prior criminal conviction. Only 3 percent had prior convictions for violent crimes.
ICE data through October 15 analyzed by the Deportation Data Project show that the vast majority of those arrests in Chicago — 67 percent — have only civil immigration violations, such as overstaying a visa or crossing the border illegally.
Arrest data for those operations tracks alongside figures for ICE arrests nationally, with nearly three-quarters of all immigrants booked into ICE custody since October having no prior criminal conviction, according to nonpublic ICE data leaked to libertarian thinktank Cato Institute.
Nearly half of all ICE detainees booked into custody from October through mid-November had not been charged with any crime, according to Cato’s report.
Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction, Cato found.
Homeland Security has disputed the findings, calling Cato’s numbers “made up” with “no legitimate data behind it.”
The share of those arrested with past convictions for violent crimes like assault, robbery or homicide fell to 5 percent in mid-October, compared with 15 percent in 2024, according to Deportation Data Project figures.
But immigration arrests have exploded, fueled by high-profile operations in Democratic-led cities with large immigrant populations, swift arrests of immigrants leaving their court hearings, and a recent Supreme Court decision that has allowed federal agents to racially profile people suspected of living in the country illegally, paving the way for street-level sweeps.
Recent reporting from ProPublica has also uncovered more than 170 cases of immigration agents detaining U.S. citizens so far this year. Charges were dropped or never filed in dozens of those cases, the outlet found.
Homeland Security has argued that those officers only arrest citizens if they “obstructed or assaulted law enforcement.”
More than 60,000 people are in ICE custody in facilities across the country, a record high, as the Trump administration is on pace to deport more than 600,000 people from the country within the first year of the president’s second term in office.
A first look at the results of Trump’s first wave of immigration operations in U.S. cities comes as the administration deploys a “strike team” to Minneapolis and the launch of yet another border patrol blitz, this time in New Orleans.
Homeland Security hailed the arrests of several “child sex offenders, domestic abusers, and violent gang members” during “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota on Thursday, as well as the first arrests of “criminal illegal aliens” in the newly launched “Operation Catahoula Crunch” in southeast Louisiana.
“Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens harming them, their families, or their neighbors,” assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
