Leaked Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show that nearly three-quarters of detainees have no criminal conviction, undermining President Donald Trump’s promise to remove “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”
The figures, leaked to the libertarian Cato Institute, expose the gulf between the administration’s rhetoric and results, as Trump’s top enforcer, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, insists the dragnet is targeting America’s “worst of the worst.”
Since Oct. 1, 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody had no criminal conviction, while nearly half had neither a conviction nor pending charges, according to the Cato analysis. Just 5 percent had a violent conviction.
ICE detained almost as many people for immigration offenses—such as illegal entry or re-entry—as for violent crimes.
Cato’s director of immigration studies, David Bier, said: “President Trump’s deportation agenda does not match the campaign promises that he made, nor the rhetoric from his officials. The agenda is taking resources away from targeting true public safety threats, whether from immigrants or Americans. ICE should redirect its resources back toward serious public safety threats.”
Separate figures obtained by CBS News for Border Patrol’s latest operation in North Carolina suggest it is facing similar problems.
Addressing the data, the agency’s lead commander for its operations in Chicago and Charlotte, Gregory Bovino, who earlier this month was declared by a judge to be a liar after he falsely claimed he was hit in the head with a rock before lobbing tear gas at protesters, said to Bier on X, “Many immigration offenses are felonies and should be counted. Traffic offenses such as DWI sure as hell count.
“Thousands of dead Americans attention to that [sic]. You know, the dead Americans you ignore while you’re busy choosing illegal aliens over US citizens.”
Cato noted that the shift in arrests began after April 26, 2025, when the White House leaned harder into mass detentions. Compared with the October 2024–April 2025 period, 80 percent of the surge in daily ICE book-ins since October has come from people with no criminal convictions.
Other datasets back those patterns. A Freedom of Information Act release reviewed by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law and UCLA School of Law found that by late July, 67 percent of ICE arrests were of people without criminal convictions, and nearly 40 percent had no convictions or charges.
Under President Joe Biden, just one in 10 arrests involved people with no criminal history, the researchers reported.
The scale of the increase is stark, with ICE arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions ballooning 571 percent from January, while arrests of people with no conviction and no charge jumped 1,500 percent, according to the FOIA dataset.
ICE’s own public-facing detention dashboard paints a similar picture. By mid-November, 69 percent of ICE detainees arrested by ICE officers had no criminal conviction, and 40 percent had no charge at all. Meanwhile, detainees who had criminal convictions but no pending charges skyrocketed from fewer than 1,000 in January to more than 21,000—a 2,370 percent increase.
ICE data show the share of people detained after an ICE arrest who have criminal convictions has dropped from 62 percent in January to 31 percent in November, while those held with no conviction or charge have jumped from six percent to 40 percent.
Deportation figures follow the same pattern. In November 2025, ICE’s data show that 70 percent of people it removed had no criminal convictions, and 43 percent had neither a conviction nor a pending charge.
CBS News reported that only one-third of Border Patrol arrests in Charlotte, North Carolina, during Trump’s high-profile “Green Army” deployment involved people with criminal histories.
A DHS spokesperson said the figures cited by CBS News were “likely inaccurate” but did not provide any alternate breakdown of criminality beyond what appeared in the document.
The department did, though, finally release some meaningful figures of its own. After months of offering only percentage increases, Noem posted on X that there had been a 1,153 percent increase in assaults on agents between Jan. 21 and Nov. 21 this year.
She said that figure represented 238 reported assaults against ICE law enforcement compared to 19 during the same period last year.
“President Trump and I will always stand with the men and women of @ICEgov who risk their lives every single day to arrest the worst of the worst.”
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS and the White House for comment.
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