News India Times

www.newsindiatimes.com – that’s all you need to know News India Times (December 6, 2025 - December 12, 2025) December 12, 2025 26 Immigration 5% Of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions P resident Donald Trump premised his mass deportation agenda on the idea that he will be “returning millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly claimed that they are arresting the “worst of the worst.” New nonpublic data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leaked to the Cato Institute reveal a different story. Of people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year (since October 1, 2025): • Nearly three in four (73 percent) had no criminal conviction. • Nearly half had no criminal convic- tion nor even any pending criminal charges. • Only 8 percent had a violent or prop- erty criminal conviction. • Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction. • A majority of criminal convicts had vice, immigration, or traffic convic- tions. The appendix table at the end of this report provides the detailed breakdown of the data by detailed type of crime. The earliest data I obtained that was reported in this way comes from April 26, 2025. Compared with October 2024 to April 2025—before theWhite House shifted focus completely away from crimi- nals—80 percent of the increase in daily ICE book-ins have come from individuals without criminal convictions. Since October 1, only 8 percent of detained persons had either a violent or property crime. As many people were detained with an immigration convic- tion (e.g., illegal entry/reentry) as violent convicts. In its posts on this subject, DHS and ICE often include people with pending criminal charges as “criminal arrests,” even though these people have never been found guilty, and the charges are often minor and regularly dismissed. ICE is depriving these people of due process by arresting them prior to a conviction. Nonetheless, ICE data show that nearly half (47 percent) of all ICE detainees this fiscal year Other data sources support the conclu- sions from the number of ICE book-ins. The Deportation Data Project, which is run by UC Berkeley Law School in col- laboration with the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, has obtained data on ICE arrests via the Freedom of Information Act. ICE arrests are individuals charged as removable by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so it excludes people arrested by Border Patrol and referred to ICE for detention who are included in the data above. This arrest dataset also does not dis- close the type of crime committed. In any case, it similarly shows that by late July, 67 percent of ICE arrests were of people with- out criminal convictions. It also shows that by late July, nearly 40 percent of ICE arrests were of people without criminal convictions or criminal charges. This is a dramatic change from President Joseph Biden’s policies under which only one in 10 arrests were individuals without any criminal conviction or charge. More important than the share of arrests is the absolute number of By David J. Bier, Cato Photo:CourtesyCATO.ORG - Continued On Page 27