Will Trump's Immigration Enforcement Policies Target Dangerous Criminals? - A Close Look at the Data

ICE represents its enforcement surge as targeting dangerous criminals, but data tells a different story. Why non-criminals will make up the bulk of ICE arrests, detentions, and deportations.

The Trump administration is justifying the recent surge in immigration enforcement by representing immigrants as criminals. These claims are not new. The idea that all immigrants are dangerous is as old as immigration restrictions themselves, which began in earnest in the late 1800s and continue to this day.

What is new is that we have more public data than ever that we can use to evaluate these claims and make reasonable assessments of who is likely to be most affected by immigration enforcement. More than just fact checking the current administration, however, I also hope this serves as a useful exploration of immigration data that raises the quality of public debate about immigration policy.

In order to make sense of the representation of immigrants as criminals, we first need to examine the new ways in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is representing the enforcement surge online. Then we will examine the debates about “criminality” as a justification for deportation policies. Finally, we take a deep dive into the hard data around arrests, detention, and deportations.

I won’t make you scroll to the end like an M. Night Shyamalan film to realize the twist. Instead, let me lay out the entire message right up front. A review of the available data reveals a simple empirical reality: the only way for the Trump administration to increase all of its immigration enforcement numbers (arrests, detentions, deportations, etc.) is to target people who have no criminal convictions.

What you make of this is up to you. If you believe that everyone in the country unlawfully, no matter the reason, should be deported, this finding will probably not affect you. If you believe that no one, regardless of criminal history, should be deported, this finding probably won’t affect you either.

However, I believe that this finding is important for two main reasons. First, it’s important to be level-headed and fact-based about how we assess the Trump administration’s representation of their enforcement practices. In a true democracy, accountability is an essential role of researchers, journalists, and the public. Second, survey after survey shows that most people believe in some degree of leniency for immigrants depending on criminal histories, so the public deserves to have access to the facts, not just rhetoric, on this divisive issue.

Let’s do this! This is a longer post with lots of references and data sources. But trust me: I’ll walk you through each step of the analysis as clearly and simply as possible. No matter what your views are about immigration or your level of knowledge of the immigration system, I’ve done my best to help you come away with a better understanding of the data. What you do with that understanding is up to you, but I hope you’ll use it to be a more critical consumer of news and participate as a more informed citizen in our fragile democracy.

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ICE’s Social Media Selection Bias

In my last post, I discussed ICE’s new social media strategy of posting immigration enforcement data. (See ICE's Immigration Enforcement Data: Can You Trust It?) But the agency has also adopted another more dominant social media strategy: memeifying immigration enforcement.

The agency now posts several memes a day of alleged “serious criminals”, complete with photographs, nationality, crimes, and sometimes even their full names. This gives the impression—is designed to give the impression—that Trump’s enforcement surge is primarily about removing dangerous criminals. And if you look at the images below, it certainly sends a powerful emotional message.

But is this a fair and accurate representation of the total reality of immigration enforcement? I don’t think so. For one, many of the people currently in ICE custody or deported so far were likely arrested and detained during the Biden administration. That’s just how these timelines usually work. Moreover, none of the information below is actually substantiated in any way by the agency and it would not surprise me if, after FOIA requests and lawsuits, we learn that these posts were not entirely accurate.

Screenshot of ICE’s media page on X/Twitter. Source.

This isn’t just a Trump thing. I scraped hundreds of posts from ICE’s Instagram page early in the Biden administration and found that many of the posts showed images of individuals being arrested or deported for purportedly serious crimes—just like this. What is new is the design and frequency with which ICE is posting these memes, as well as the fact that these posts seem to have displaced all of the regular federal agency-type posts that agencies usually share online.

In short, ICE has gone all in representing the current immigration enforcement surge as if it were focused on allegedly serious criminals. Even if these posts are accurate, when we’re looking at tens of thousands of people detained and deported, representing only those cases of alleged public safety threats is a case of serious selection bias that is designed to shape the public conversation about immigration.

We will look at the government’s own data on immigration enforcement below. But before we do so, we need to discuss competing perspectives over how to interpret the figure of the “criminal alien.”

Debates Over the Role of Immigrants’ Criminal Histories

A legitimate question has been raised many times by immigration scholars: should a person’s run-in with the law be interpreted as a legitimate basis for banishment?

Those who say “no” point to many significant factors. They point out that the criminal legal system treats communities of color, the working poor, and non-citizens in uniquely harsh and unjust ways that do not apply to others. The modern classic The New Jim Crow by Michele Alexander illuminates the role of race in shaping nearly every step of the legal system, from who gets pulled over by police all the way to who gets prison sentences and for how long. A similar vein of research inspired by Alexander’s work has also emerged around the concept of “the new Juan Crow”, or the often hidden role that Latino identity plays in our legal system.

They also point out the enormous differences in how white collar criminals, who often hurt far more people, are treated compared to people convicted of something as simple as marijuana possession. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione reignited debates about how our legal system handles the face-to-face murder of one person compared to the faceless denial of live-giving medical care to thousands of people. Not to be mistaken, both the left and the right have this same concern—if applied selectively. Many on the right have called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be executed because they believe that his mistakes led to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Others point out that the ideals of the criminal legal system, going back to such grand experiments as the Eastern State Penitentiary, were inspired by a vision of rehabilitation, not merely punishment, and that those ideals should extend to immigrants as much as citizens. Thus, even if someone has committed a crime, the better angels of our nature should seek real solutions to the root causes of crime, not resort to deportation. This argument is often articulated alongside the objective harm that deportation—even deportation of someone with a criminal conviction—causes to families including US citizen spouses and children.

For a more robust exposition of these critiques, see my discussion of César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández’s book Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the Criminal Alien (link below). I also encourage you to visit his new blog online here.

Rethinking the Criminal Alien: Insights from "Welcome the Wretched" – A Book Review

In addition to arguments about criminal histories, an avalanche of empirical research shows that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US-born citizens. Here are just a few such studies from reputable research-driven sources:

• Immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born

• Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’

• Explainer: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

• Why Do Illegal Immigrants Have a Low Crime Rate? 12 Possible Explanations

Many people will outright reject any discussion of rehabilitation and grace to immigrants with criminal histories. Like the supporters of the Laken Riley Act, as well as many law enforcement officers I’ve interviewed over the years, many people argue that any crime committed by a person without lawful status is a crime that shouldn’t have happened in the first place because the person had no right to be in the country. They point to specific instances of serious crimes to drive home the argument that we need increased enforcement to save lives and keep our communities safe. This position is currently winning on the policy front and will likely gain traction as Democrats join Republicans in changing the laws and policies of the country to reflect this position.

These debates notwithstanding, the truth is, the immigration system as it functions today is profoundly shaped by immigrants’ criminal histories—whether we agree that should be the case or not. Certain charges and convictions can get even lawful immigrants detained and deported, or can prevent immigrants from being eligible for humanitarian protections like asylum. Additionally, the popular discourse about immigration enforcement is saturated with a mix of good faith (but not always well-informed) concern and bad faith fear-mongering about immigrants with serious criminal convictions.

I cannot resolve public debates about these larger questions, certainly not in a single essay. What I can do in a single essay, however, is make a simple but overlooked point using the government’s own data to clear up misconceptions about who will be targeted over the next four years. The simple fact is: there is no way for the Trump administration to achieve any of its enforcement goals without targeting immigrants with no criminal histories. By making this simple point, I want to establish a clear empirical baseline for how we talk about immigration enforcement.

Overview of Immigration Enforcement Data

I summarize data below on three key areas: arrests, detentions, and deportations (i.e., “removals”).

Watch for this trend in the data. Throughout the data below, you’ll notice that immigrants without criminal histories tend to drive the overall numbers of arrests, detentions, and deportations. Whereas the number of immigrants with convictions or pending criminal charges usually remains relatively constant, the number of immigrants without criminal histories fluctuates significantly.

The reason for focusing on ICE. My focus on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) here is intentional, but requires some explanation. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol (CBP), also has a role in arresting, detaining, and deporting people. However, because CBP usually operates along the border, the people they come into contact with tend to be recent arrives who, by definition, are less likely to have criminal histories in the United States. Thus, the more people who are in detention as a result of CBP’s enforcement activities, the fewer number of people in detention will be listed as having US criminal histories. By contrast, ICE’s enforcement activity focuses in places where immigrants have typically settled longer (and therefore have had more time to come into contact with law enforcement). Additionally, ICE may have cooperative agreements with local law enforcement agencies, which means that ICE’s reason for arrest might stem from an immigrant’s initial contact with law enforcement. Therefore, ICE’s data usually reflects higher rates of criminal history overall compared to CBP.

Deportation doesn’t require a criminal conviction. I want to be very clear on this point: if an immigrant is in the country without status, and certainly if that person already has a removal order, the law says that the government can deport that person regardless of whether they have a criminal history. If there were no additional misleading rhetoric about immigration enforcement, we could end it right there. The problem is, layered on top of this legal reality are multiple discursive frameworks that conflate the fact and confuse reality and fiction.

Immigrants with convictions are a limited group. Although ICE certainly can arrest anyone who falls within the estimated 12 million or so undocumented immigrants in the United States, the number of immigrants with criminal charges or convictions is not infinite. I have heard a theory I find somewhat convincing that goes like this: the huge number of deportations under the Obama administration did, in fact, include a lot of people with criminal histories, thereby reducing that subset of the immigrant population enough that comparatively few immigrants with criminal histories are left. This is one reason why, if the Trump administration wants to increase deportations, they’ll have to focus on non-criminals, because there simply aren’t enough people with convictions left to target at the scale they need to in order to produce big deportation numbers.

Please use and share the data. The charts below are all based on the government’s own data. I have arranged the data to make it more legible, but have otherwise maintained the terminology in the source data. You are welcome to download the data for each graphic to see it for yourself. I also encourage you to distribute any of the graphs below on social media, embed them in your own online post, or use them in presentations. If you have any further questions about the data or the graphs, or if you see any possible errors, please let me know and I’ll respond as quickly as possible.

1. ICE Arrests

Let’s start with ICE arrests. Since 2021, the overall trend has been largely driven by arrests of immigrants with only immigration violations. The 2021 data was artificially low due to COVID-19 policies, creating an unusually low starting point. Between FY 2021 and FY 2022, the entire increase in ICE arrests came from detaining immigrants without criminal convictions or pending charges. While arrests of immigrants with convictions or pending charges did rise significantly after 2022, they did not increase enough to offset the dominance of arrests involving "other immigration violators"—those with only immigration-related infractions.

The dataset above comes from ICE’s enforcement dashboards, which were introduced under the Biden administration and do not extend far into the past. A longer dataset is available from the new Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), though it does not include arrests of individuals with pending charges. This broader dataset reveals a notable trend from 2014 to 2020, when ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested more individuals with criminal convictions than those without. (If only we had data going back to 2008!) However, after 2020—essentially following the pandemic pause—ICE arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions surged, then declined, while arrests of those with convictions never fully rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

This began to change when Trump took office the first time in 2017, when we see the total number of immigrants with criminal convictions decline objectively during his entire term, while the number of immigrants with no conviction increased immediately—likely what we are also seeing right now. This lasted up until the pandemic when everything declined to historic lows.

After 2020—effectively after the pandemic pause—ICE’s arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions spiked considerably, then fell, while ICE’s arrests of immigrants with criminal convictions never quite recovered to pre-pandemic levels. The spike in arrests of non-criminals stands out to me as needing more research because I don’t think it reflects aggressive ICE enforcement. I will try to find a defensible explanation and if I do, I’ll revise this part of the report with an update.

2. ICE Detention

Now, let’s examine immigrant detention. The first dataset below, also from ICE’s enforcement dashboard, represents detention “events” within a single fiscal year. Typically, we see detention data reported as a snapshot of the detained population on a given day—this is how ICE presents it in its Congressionally mandated biweekly reports. However, this dataset tracks the total number of detention events, offering a broader view of how many individuals pass through ICE’s detention system each year. Both approaches provide valuable insights, each with its own advantages and limitations.

Similar to the trend in ICE ERO arrests, the sharp increase in detention numbers from FY 2021 to FY 2022 was entirely driven by immigrants with only immigration violations. Unlike arrest data, however, detention figures show that immigrants with no criminal record have remained the majority, making up approximately 65% of all detainees in FY 2024.

The dataset below provides a more granular view of the detained population on certain given days as published by ICE in their biweekly detention spreadsheet. Here we see a very strong correlation between immigrants without any criminal histories and the total detained population at any given point in time. consistent with my overarching observation above, the number of immigrants without criminal histories is much more volatile and tends to drive the overall detention numbers.

Now let’s look at book-ins. As opposed to the total detained population on any given day, book-ins represent the number of people initially booked into a detention facility. (The distinction might seem purely technical, but depending on your analysis one data set may be better than the other.)

Again we see the same pattern: book-ins of people with no criminal history is the largest category and is the easiest for ICE to ratchet up or down depending on their priorities and resources.

Just to drive home the point so far: more immigration enforcement always means, as a rule, more people without criminal convictions getting arrested and detained. There may also be a slow and steady rise in the number of immigrants with criminal convictions or charges being arrested and detained. But these numbers are simply more difficult to change.

3. Deportations

At this point, I feel like I’m beating a dead horse but stay with me through the final section. If you’ve been paying attention so far, there won’t be any surprises.

Looking at all deportations from DHS on a monthly basis, we once again see that deportations of immigrants with criminal convictions are stickier and lower than deportations of immigrants without criminal convictions.

The Biden administration deported more than a quarter million people last year, which was one of the highest years in recent memory. Nearly all of that massive growth came from immigrants without criminal convictions. And how could it have been otherwise? They’re simply aren’t enough immigrants with criminal convictions in this country to deport a quarter million of those people in a given year.

As I mentioned above, ICE is not the only agency that has a hand in effectuating removals. As a result, deportations attributed specifically to ICE EOR is a subset of the total deportations from the Department of Homeland Security in total.

Until 2020, ICE ERO removals for criminals and non-criminals alike we’re both fairly volatile with non-criminals making up a slightly smaller fraction of the total. However, just as we saw elsewhere, nearly all of the growth in these removals under the Biden administration since the pandemic have been immigrants without criminal convictions.

What can be said factually about immigration enforcement and criminal histories?

The data shows that any major expansion of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration would require a significant rise in arrests, detentions, and deportations of people with no criminal background. This isn't a policy argument, or a moral argument, this is simply the reality born out in the data about who will be affected by an increase in immigration enforcement across the country over the next four years.

In the coming months and years, the absolute number of immigrants with serious or any criminal convictions who are arrested, detained, and deported is expected to remain stable or increase—although probably not dramatically. However, as a share of total immigration enforcement, this group will almost certainly decline. Moreover, because immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens, immigration enforcement is unlikely to reduce crime and could, in some cases, contribute to higher crime rates in certain areas.

If the administration’s rhetoric and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) public messaging more accurately reflected the actual composition of those being arrested, detained, and deported, it would show that the majority are individuals without legal status but no criminal history beyond immigration violations. again, I want to be clear: there's nothing keeping the administration from going after everyone.

When faced with these facts, Trump, his officials, and pro-enforcement advocates will likely respond by saying they are enforcing immigration laws across the board, not just targeting criminals, and that unlawful entry is, in itself, a violation of the law. While that statement may be technically accurate, it is at odds with how they publicly portray their actions. Rather than acknowledging that most deportations involve people without serious criminal records, they consistently emphasize the claim that they are removing dangerous criminals from the country—a claim that is simply false.

There is an important distinction between making a truthful statement that others might disagree with for political or ethical reasons and misrepresenting reality in a way that misleads the public for political gain.

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