More than a third of the roughly 222,000 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the nine months before the Trump administration took office had no criminal records, new data shows, despite the White House’s frequent claims that its immigration crackdown targets violent criminals.
Nearly 75,000 of the people arrested by ICE between January 20 and October 15 had no criminal record, according to data obtained by the UC Berkeley Deportation Data Project in a lawsuit against federal officials.
Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told NBC News about the findings, which “contradict what the government has been saying about convicted criminals and that they are going after the worst of the worst.”
The agency is averaging about 824 arrests per day, data shows, well below a reported internal goal of 3,000 arrests per day.
At the start of Trump’s second term, ICE stopped releasing details about his arrests.
While the Trump administration says it will go after criminals and threats of violence, immigration officials have arrested thousands of people with criminal records, according to newly obtained data (Getty Images)
The data do not include people detained by the Border Patrol, which has played an increasingly important role in Trump’s deportation crackdown in cities across the country, although other analyzes have shown similar trends.
Less than a third of the people Border Patrol arrested during a recent operation in Charlotte, North Carolina, were classified as criminals, according to internal Homeland Security documents obtained by CBS News.
As of mid-November, about 73% of the roughly 65,000 people in immigration detention after being apprehended by ICE and Border Patrol had no prior criminal convictions, and most of those convicted were for minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to the TRAC immigration database.
The Trump administration has provided unprecedented funding to agencies including ICE and the Border Patrol (Getty Images)
Immigration officials have detained dozens of U.S. citizens, including children, as they pursue the Trump administration’s goal of record arrests and deportations, and immigration officials have been accused of using racial profiling to target Latinos in random sweeps.
The scope of immigration enforcement has only expanded under the Trump administration, which has allocated $170 billion to ICE and the Border Patrol, an unprecedented level of funding as part of the Beauty Act spending package passed earlier this year.
