Criminal History of 200k People Taken By ICE [View all]
65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions
June 20, 2025 11:19AM
By David J. Bier
New nonpublic data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate that the government is primarily detaining individuals with no criminal convictions of any kind. Also, among those with criminal convictions, they are overwhelmingly not the violent offenses that ICE continuously uses to justify its deportation agenda. ICE has shared this data with people outside the agency, who shared the numbers with the Cato Institute.
As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes. The appendix table at the end of this post has data by detailed crime and broad crime categorization ...