After six months of aggressive immigration enforcement and promises to focus on deporting violent criminals, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a small fraction of the undocumented immigrants already known to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as having been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, internal ICE data obtained by NBC News shows.
The data is a tally of every person booked by ICE from Oct. 1 through May 31, part of which was during the Biden administration. It shows a total of 185,042 people arrested and booked into ICE facilities during that time; 65,041 of them have been convicted of crimes. The most common categories of crimes they committed were immigration and traffic offenses.
Almost half of the people currently in ICE custody have neither been convicted of nor charged with any crime, other ICE data shows.
Last fall, ICE told Congress that 13,099 people convicted of homicide and 15,811 people convicted of sexual assault were on its non-detained docket, meaning it knew who they were but did not have them in custody. A spokesperson said at the time that ICE had some information about but did not know the exact whereabouts of all the immigrants on the non-detained docket and that some could have left the United States or could be in prison.
Running for president at the time, Donald Trump used those figures to criticize his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“These are hard, tough, vicious criminals that are free to roam in our country,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan.
The new data obtained by NBC News shows that from Oct. 1 to May 31, ICE arrested 752 people convicted of homicide and 1,693 people convicted of sexual assault, meaning that at the absolute most, the Trump administration has detained only 6% of the undocumented immigrants known to ICE to have been convicted of homicide and 11% of those known to ICE to have been convicted of sexual assault.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin called the data inaccurate but did not provide raw numbers of arrests by criminal category.
“The premise of your question relies on inaccurate data. Secretary [Kristi] Noem has unleashed the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to target the worst of the worst — including gang members, murderers, and rapists. In President Trump’s first 100 days, 75% of ICE arrests were criminal illegal aliens with convictions or pending charges,” McLaughlin said in response to NBC News.
Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, has also asked ICE for a breakdown of how many murderers, rapists and other criminals ICE has arrested, noting that the idea of going after the “worst of the worst” is popular among both Democrats and Republicans.
Gonzales said he wants ICE to use its tactical teams to focus on arresting the most violent criminals. “I want them doing that type of work, not raiding Home Depot and, you know, fending off violent riots,” he told NBC News this week.
And he argued that getting violent criminals off the streets is more important than high arrest numbers.
“One can say, you know, ‘I deported 1,000 people today,’ and someone can say, ‘Wow, you’re doing such a great job.’ Well, if, of those thousand people, none of them are convicted criminals … have you truly made our community any more safe than it was before?”
A senior DHS official said it is much more difficult to arrest serious criminals than noncriminal immigrants, in part because of the workforce involved in investigating and arresting high-risk targets. The official said the agency has shifted away from prioritizing detaining and deporting the criminals that Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, calls the “worst of the worst” and is instead focused on deporting anyone who does not have legal status.
“They want everybody who cannot show their papers to get out of the country,” said the official, who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation for openly criticizing the administration’s approach.
The administration has recently given mixed messages about whom it is targeting, bouncing between saying it is going after violent criminal immigrants and widening its scope to anyone who is in the country illegally.
But the administration’s efforts to detain immigrants who are not criminals have begun to raise concerns with Gonzales, as well as some of his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill.
Gonzales and five other Republican members sent a letter to ICE this month asking for an update on how many criminal noncitizens it had arrested.
“While we do agree that we are a nation of laws—and that all who crossed our borders illegally are subject to those laws—there are levels of priority that must be considered when it comes to immigration enforcement. Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives,” they wrote.
