More than a third of the roughly 220,000 people arrested by ICE officers in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal histories, according to new data.
The data, which includes ICE arrests from Jan. 20 to Oct. 15, shows that nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records have been swept up in immigration operations that the president and his top officials have said would target murderers, rapists and gang members.
“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,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
The figures provide the most revealing look to date into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They were shared by the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, which obtained them through a lawsuit brought against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The data is compiled by an internal ICE office that handles arrest, detention and deportation data. The administration stopped regularly posting detailed information on ICE arrests in January.
For arrestees with criminal histories, the data doesn’t distinguish between those with a history of minor offenses and those who have committed more serious crimes, like rape and murder, whom the administration has said it is targeting.
And the figures do not include arrests made by Border Patrol, which has launched aggressive immigration operations in several cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina. Border Patrol sweeps are currently underway in New Orleans.
Border Patrol and ICE are both under the Department of Homeland Security but they are two different agencies with two different missions. Border Patrol agents typically operate along the southern and northern borders, but recently hundreds have been sent into the interior of the United States to track down undocumented immigrants.
“That is the black box that we know nothing about,” Ruiz Soto said. “How many arrests is Border Patrol doing? How many of those are leading to removals and under what conditions?”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE field offices have been under intense pressure to ramp up arrests.
In mid-May, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller threatened to fire senior ICE officials if they did not begin arresting at least 3,000 migrants per day, NBC News previously reported.
But the new data shows that ICE is still falling well short of those targets.
ICE agents have made an average daily total of 824 arrests since Jan. 20, according to the data. Those figures are still more than double the average daily arrest total under the Biden administration in 2024, when ICE arrested 312 people per day.
The data also reveals that about 90% of the people ICE arrested through mid-October were male. Mexican nationals accounted for the largest share of the overall arrests, with about 85,000, followed by nationals of Guatemala at 31,000 and Honduras at 24,000.
More than 60% of those who were arrested were between the ages of 25 and 45.
“Now we’re really feeling that pain in the workforce,” said George Carrillo, chief executive officer of the Hispanic Construction Council.
Carrillo praised the Trump administration for its efforts to secure the border but said the ongoing enforcement operations are having a significant impact on companies that employ migrant workers.
“Now even the most conservative Republicans are feeling it and understanding that, hey, something different has to be done because now it is affecting their businesses,” he said. “And they’re worried about this strategy.”
It’s not clear from the data how many of those who were arrested were deported, but 22,959 are listed under the category of “voluntary departure,” meaning they left the United States of their own accord.
ICE is currently holding 65,000 migrants in detention centers around the country, according to DHS data posted online.
@ NBC News
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