More than one third of the roughly 222,000 people Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal history, according to newly obtained data, despite the White House’s frequent claims it is targeting violent criminals with its immigration crackdown.
Between January 20 and October 15, nearly 75,000 of those arrested by ICE lacked criminal history, according to data obtained by the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project in a lawsuit against federal officials.
“It contradicts what the administration has been saying about people who are convicted criminals and that they are going after the worst of the worst,” Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told NBC News of the findings.
The agency has averaged about 824 arrests per day, according to the data, well short of a reported internal goal of 3,000 arrests per day.
ICE stopped posting detailed information about its arrests at the beginning of the second Trump term.
The data does not include arrest figures covering those detained by the Border Patrol, which has taken an increasingly prominent role under Trump leading deportation crackdowns in cities across the country, though other analyses suggest similar trends.
During a recent operation in Charlotte, North Carolina, fewer than one-third of those the Border Patrol arrested were already classified as criminals, according to internal Homeland Security documents obtained by CBS News.
As of mid-November, about 73 percent of the roughly 65,000 people in immigration detention after being arrested by ICE and the Border Patrol had no previous criminal conviction, and most of those with convictions were for minor offenses like traffic violations, according to the TRAC immigration database.
In the course of chasing the Trump administration’s goals of a record number of arrests and deportations, immigration officials have detained scores of U.S. citizens, including children, and agents have been accused of random sweeps using racial profiling to target Latinos.
The scope of immigration enforcement is only set to increase under the Trump administration, which has steered $170 billion to ICE and the Border Patrol as part of the Big, Beautiful Bill spending package that passed earlier this year, an unprecedented level of funding.
