by While U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to remove “the worst of the worst,” government data shows that most of the people being held by immigration agents right now have not been convicted of a crime.
Also, not many have been found guilty of serious crimes, which is very different from the scary nightmare Trump talks about to support his border security plan.
The most recent numbers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show that as of June 29, 57,861 people were being held, and 41,495 of them (71.7%) had never been convicted of a crime. In that group are 14,318 people who are facing criminal charges and 27,177 people who are being watched by immigration officials but have no known criminal records or charges.
“There’s a big gap between what people say and what happens,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School.
ICE gives each prisoner a threat level on a scale from 1 to 3, with 1 being the most dangerous. People who have never been in trouble with the law are called “no ICE threat level.” The most recent figures, from June 23, shows that 84% of people being held at 201 facilities across the country were not given a threat level. 7.1% were rated as a level 1 threat, 4.2% as a level 2 threat, and 5.1% as a level 3 threat.
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said that the administration is putting all of its efforts into getting rid of crooks who are in the country illegally and have not been checked out.
“Just this week, the Administration conducted a successful operation rescuing children from labour exploitation at a marijuana facility in California, and continued arresting the worst of the worst — including murderers, pedophiles, gang members, and rapists,” she said in an email. “Any suggestion that the Administration is not laser-focused on these dangerous criminals is flat out wrong.”
Trump advisor sets arrest quotas
An open source report from the Cato Institute, a liberal think tank, shows that as of June 14, 65% of the more than 204,000 people who had been processed by ICE since the start of fiscal year 2025 on October 1, 2024, had not been convicted of a crime. The people who had been convicted only did violent crimes 6.9% of the time. The other 53% had done minor crimes that fell into three main groups: immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.
Most people who are detained by ICE have not been guilty of a crime, but some of them have. The government released details on five high-level criminals who had been arrested on Friday.
During his campaign, Trump called immigrants “vermin” and talked about how people who were in the country illegally were arrested for terrible crimes.
In January, he signed the Laken Riley Act into law, which says that illegal aliens accused of theft or violent crimes must be held. The act is named for the Georgia nursing student who died last year at the hands of a Venezuelan man who was in the U.S. illegally.
However, studies have shown over and over that immigrants do not increase serious crime in the U.S. and in fact commit fewer crimes than Americans born in the U.S. For example, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2023 said that immigrants have had lower imprisonment rates than people born in the U.S. for 150 years. In fact, the numbers have gone down since 1960; the paper says that immigrants were 60% less likely to be in jail.
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said, “President Trump has defended this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are causing violent crime in the United States. That’s just not true.” “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.” A U.S. appeals court said President Donald Trump could keep the California National Guard troops stationed in Los Angeles. This briefly overturned a lower court’s decision that the state should take back control of the troops.
At the end of May, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told ICE that they had to make 3,000 arrests every day. This was up from 650 arrests every day in the first five months of Trump’s second term. The Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC, says that ICE arrested almost 30% more people in May than in April. In June, that number went up by another 28%.
The false talk coming from the Trump government does real damage, say experts.
This new wave of immigration enforcement, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, was caused by a “arbitrary arrest quota” and “broad stereotypes based on race or ethnicity.”
A farm raid ends in death
People of color and immigrants in Southern California have been on edge for weeks since the Trump administration increased searches at car washes, Home Depot parking lots, immigration courts, and other places. Tens of thousands of people have rallied in the area against the raids and the following deployment of the National Guard and Marines to the Los Angeles area. Across the country, the aggressive push for deportation has led to legal challenges.
A farmworker fell from a greenhouse roof during a chaotic ICE raid this week at a California weed facility and died on Saturday from his injuries. He was the first person known to have died during one of the Trump administration’s ongoing operations to enforce immigration laws. The niece of 57-year-old Jaime Alanis, Yesenia Duran, told The Associated Press that Alanis had died.
The DHS said that on Thursday, they carried out criminal search warrants at Glass House Farms sites in Camarillo and Carpinteria. Glass House has a license to grow weed. Toys and peppers are also grown on the Camarillo farm.
Alanis called his family to say he was hiding and might have been running away from agents. That was before he broke his neck when he fell nine meters from the roof, according to family, hospital, and government sources.
DHS said in a statement that about 200 people were taken because they were thought to be in the country illegally. The news service said Alanis wasn’t one of them.
While the raid was going on, a lot of people gathered outside the Camarillo facility to ask about their family members and protest immigration police. Police wearing military-style helmets and outfits fought with the protesters, and in the end, people ran away as toxic green and white smoke billowed around them.
During the incident, four U.S. citizens were arrested for “assaulting or resisting officers,” according to DHS. There was a $50,000 reward for information that led to the arrest of a person accused of firing a gun at federal agents.
