For years, President Donald Trump has framed immigrants in the U.S. as dangerous threats to American citizens for which the only solution is prison, deportation or some combination thereof. But while Trump has spent the bulk of his second term making good on his campaign promise of mass immigrant arrests and expulsions, analysis of the data from these operations may seriously challenge the administration’s anti-migrant narrative.
Skyrocketing arrests but few criminal records
Although immigration enforcement actions have netted the Trump administration “thousands of arrests,” the Department of Homeland Security’s operations have been “less effective” at detaining migrants with criminal records than “routine operations elsewhere,” said The New York Times. In “high-profile” Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and across Massachusetts, “half of those arrested had no criminal record, compared with a third of immigrants arrested nationwide.” The Deportation Data Project analyzed “every ICE arrest, detainer request and book-in to detention between Sept. 1, 2023, and Oct.15, 2025.” Those records showed that only a “very small share” of those arrested had a violent criminal background.
The data proves that ICE detentions of people without criminal records “spiked in recent months in those cities,” said CBS News. Examining only the “start” of DHS operations in Memphis, the data “reflects a similar pattern” as other cities with deeper data sets: “More than half” of detainees were people with “only civil immigration violations.”
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In Washington, D.C., where the president declared a “crime emergency” as justification for his mid-August deployments, federal authorities made “more than triple” the number of arrests in that period than the previous seven months, said The Washington Post. From August through mid-October, D.C. saw “more than a sixfold increase” in arrests of immigrants “without any criminal record at all.”
‘Just sheer numbers’
City-based ICE arrest data “tracks alongside” statistics for national ICE arrests as well, said The Independent. “Nearly three-quarters” of ICE detainees were booked into federal custody despite having “no prior criminal conviction,” according to “non-public” ICE data leaked to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Cato’s data is “so dumb” and “made up,” said Homeland Security Public Affairs official Tricia McLaughlin on X.
But the new tranche of statistics from the Deportation Data Project “refutes DHS’s response and vindicates our report’s conclusions,” said Cato’s David J. Bier in an article on the Institute’s website. While ICE, with its newly supercharged budget, could “track down” the nearly half a million immigrants it claims “have criminal convictions and are removable,” the agency instead “prefers to grab easy targets” to meet “arbitrary arrest quotas.”
If ICE’s goal is to “address violent crime or public safety,” then “you would think they would focus on people who have been doing things that would endanger public safety,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, a policy attorney at Immigrant Legal Resource Center, to the Post. Instead, “indiscriminate” enforcement operations targeted “any person who appeared to be an immigrant.” It seems that “what’s motivating” federal agents “is just sheer numbers.”
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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.
