Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have sold their tough immigration raids as missions to take down “the worst of the worst,” but the data paints a different picture.
However, a new analysis of arrest and detention records shows that in headline making operations across Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and parts of Massachusetts, most of the people swept up had no criminal record at all. In fact, the splashier the raid, the less likely agents were to actually find people with violent convictions.
The New York Times examined a trove of ICE data compiled by the Deportation Data Project through October 15, 2025. Nationally, it found that only about 28 percent of people in ICE custody had any prior criminal conviction, and just 5 percent had a violent conviction, a sharp drop from the Biden years, when nearly two thirds of detainees had criminal records.
In some of Trump’s showcase raids, the numbers were even more lopsided. In the Washington, D.C., “crime emergency” sweep, more than 80 percent of immigrants arrested had no prior criminal record, despite officials publicly tying the operation to violent crime.
Los Angeles told the same story. A Los Angeles Times review of ICE arrests in seven counties around the city found that from June 1 to June 26, 69 percent of people arrested had no criminal conviction. Only 31 percent had any record at all, and many of those were minor offenses or old cases.
Yet Trump and Noem have repeatedly defended deploying masked, heavily armed officers into Democratic run cities by pointing to local “sanctuary” policies and portraying the targets as hardened felons. Trump vowed to deport the “worst of the worst” and has continued to claim that federal agents are mainly hunting violent gang members and predators.
Independent researchers say the official narrative no longer matches reality. The Marshall Project, using ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, found that between January and May of this year, two thirds of the more than 120,000 people deported had no criminal conviction at all. Another 8 percent had only an illegal entry offense, and just 12 percent had been convicted of a crime that was violent or potentially violent.
“It’s not at all about convictions anymore,” said Tim Warden Hertz of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. “There is no discretion. It’s just trying to get as many people as they can, any way that they can.”
Regional breakdowns tell a similar story. In the Salt Lake City ICE field office, a Nevada Independent analysis found that the “vast majority” of people arrested had no convictions, and those with records were usually traffic or other nonviolent offenses. “The people that ICE likes to talk about, people with violent offenses or sexual criminal histories, are a tiny minority,” said law professor Michael Kagan.
Behind those statistics are the kinds of scenes that have fueled protests in cities across the country. The L.A. raids picked up long time garment workers, car wash employees, and street vendors outside job sites and big box stores. In Chicago’s Operation Midway Blitz, federal agents even detained U.S. citizens and a local police officer, before quietly releasing them when their legal status became undeniable.
For Trump and Noem, the raids remain a political calling card, proof, they say, that they are serious about law and order in blue cities. The numbers emerging from their own detention system tell another story, one where “crime busting” has meant mostly arresting people who have never been convicted of a crime at all.
