President Donald Trump has made a political career out of vilifying immigrants, from claiming in racist attacks they have “bad genes” to falsely accusing them of committing more crimes than Americans who were born here.
Trump spent much of the campaign talking about ridding the nation of “criminal” undocumented people. But when it comes to immigration enforcement, the Trump administration hasn’t actually focused very narrowly on people with criminal records.
Data from around the country indicates that many people arrested or deported by federal agents under Trump don’t have any serious criminal history at all, let alone any record that would raise fears about public safety.
On the Sunday following Trump’s inauguration, for example, immigration agents arrested 1,179 people — but 48% of them had no criminal history at all, apart from potentiallycrossing the border without authorization, NBC News reported based on an unnamed government source.
On Tuesday, out of 200 people sent to Colombia on two deportation flights, none were criminals, Colombian officials said. In fact, officials said the deportees on the flights included more than 20 children and two pregnant women, the Washington Post reported.
The same day, federal agents in New York arrested 20 people in a highly-publicized operation across the city. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem donned body armor and posted on social media about removing “dirtbags” from “our streets.” But, the Post reported, eight of the 20 people ultimately taken into custody in that action had no criminal record at all.
One video published by DHS Monday stated that in the week prior, immigration officials had “removed and returned 7,300 illegal aliens, including hundreds of convicted criminals.” The implication, observed journalist Aura Bogado, was that thousands of people in that group of deportees did not have criminal convictions at all.
Two Trump administration policies underscore this apparent lack of focus on undocumented people with criminal records.
Prior to Trump’s first term, then-President Barack Obama instructed immigration authorities to “prioritize” the deportation of undocumented people considered national security threats, those with serious criminal records, and those who’d recently received removal orders. Trump erased all that when he assumed office, putting in place a much broader set of priorities and making it an administration policy that no one would be exempt from deportation.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden instituted enforcement priorities of his own — similar to Obama’s — and then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas emphasized prosecutorial discretion, noting that, “the majority of undocumented noncitizens who could be subject to removal have been contributing members of our communities for years.” Taking office last week, Trump reversed Biden’s priorities, “resetting” immigration enforcement policy and encouraging immigration authorities to execute immigration laws against “all inadmissible and removable aliens.”
“When you don’t have enforcement priorities, everyone is subject to detention,” Rosanna Eugenio, legal director at the New York Immigration Coalition, told NBC News.
The second reason for the lack of focus on people with criminal records is the Trump administration’s emphasis on raw numbers. Trump campaigned on a “mass deportation” agenda, and said in his inaugural address that he would “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
At her first press conference Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how many ICE arrestees had criminal records versus those simply in the country without authorization. She rejected the premise of the question outright.
“All of them, because they illegally broke our nation’s laws,” she said.
Contrary to Leavitt’s characterization, simply overstaying a visa is a civil, not criminal, offense. Crossing the border without authorization is a misdemeanor the first time. And being deported isn’t a criminal punishment. Undocumented people can and do serve criminal prison sentences just like American citizens.
“Two things can be true at the same time,” Leavitt added, explaining that though drug dealers, rapists and murderers “should be the priority of ICE,” no one was “off the table.”
ICE field offices around the country have been instructed to hit a quota of 75 arrests per day — a figure that Trump adviser Stephen Miller has called a “floor, not a ceiling.” And the administration has tasked the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and U.S. Marshals with pitching in.
In practice, this means immigration enforcement will focus on who is easiest to arrest – not who poses the most danger to the American public. That includes undocumented people who go to ICE offices around the country for regularly scheduled check-ins with immigration agents – appointments that can turn into surprise detentions and deportations.
“Quotas will incentivize ICE officers to arrest the easiest people to arrest, rather than the people that are dangerous noncitizens,” Paul Hunker, former ICE chief counsel in Dallas, told the Post, which broke the news about the field office quotas.
“Challenging enforcement actions take time and planning and careful execution,” Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior official at ICE and DHS, including during the first Trump administration, told The New Republic.
“And if they’re being required to arrest more and more, whether that’s a quota or not, they can’t take that time that those arrests require. And so, yes, it will ultimately lead people to stop focusing on those and focus on the places where they can get bigger numbers faster.”
Across the country, local news reports suggest immigration officers might try to get their numbers up with relatively straightforward arrests – people who are wearing ankle bracelets, for example, or those involved in the criminal justice system for extremely minor offenses.
In Tucker, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta, Wilson Rogelio Velásquez Cruz was arrested by immigration agents after his ankle bracelet — which he was given by border agents after arriving at the border years ago — started ringing during a church service on Sunday. His wife, Kenia Colindres, told him to go outside and address the ankle bracelet so as to not disrupt the service, she told WSBTV. ICE agents were waiting. Colindres told 11Alive that her husband had a valid work permit and a pending asylum case, and had not been detained by law enforcement since arriving at the southern border in 2022.
In Texas, Jose Alvaro, a 29-year-old father, was detained by ICE agents after a routine traffic stop while he and his family were on the way to buy baby formula. Alvaro was in the process of applying for a green card. He has no apparent criminal record, The Texas Tribune reported.
In Lynn, Massachusetts, one 18-year-old girl was detained by ICE after police were called when she quarreled with her little brother over a cell phone, resulting in a misdemeanor assault and battery charge.
“We have been told that ICE would be targeting violent offenders whose presence puts our community at risk,” Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson told MassLive. “Based on what we have learned so far, that is not what is happening in this case.”
Reports have also emerged of Puerto Ricans and Native Americans — U.S. citizens — being stopped and detained by ICE, potentially the result of racial profiling.
There’s one more key detail for understanding Trump’s immigration enforcement priorities: Just because someone is arrested by immigration agents doesn’t mean they’ll be deported.
While some categories of undocumented people are able to be deported quickly, such as those whose cases have already been heard by immigration courts or who qualify for “expedited removal,” most are not.
In the meantime, undocumented people who encounter immigration agents either have to be held in federal custody — and there aren’t that many beds across the entire country for immigration detention — or they must be released, and will be required to show up to an immigration office for regular check-ins.
And ICE only has funding to detain around 42,000 people, including through contracts with private prison companies and local governments. Almost all of those beds were already occupied when Biden left office.
“Unless someone shows me data to the contrary, many of these people arrested will be released from custody in a relatively short period of time,” observed Austin Kocher, a professor of geography at Syracuse University who studies immigration enforcement. “They are not all staying in detention.”
Kocher added in an email to HuffPost, “Unless they fall under a mandatory detention classification, ICE does not currently have the bed space to indefinitely detain everyone they are arresting.”
We’ve already seen what happens when an indiscriminate immigration enforcement policy runs up against limited bed space in federal immigration detention: It raises the risk of releasing more people with criminal records from detention.
In October last year, the Cato Institute crunched the numbers, finding in a report that “In 2019, Trump’s ICE released more than twice the number of individuals convicted of crimes compared to any year during Biden’s presidency.” That year, the report found, “ICE was using 68 percent of its detention space for individuals without any criminal convictions.”
According to the same report, “a big pre-pandemic reason for the releases under the Trump administration was that it was determined to detain as many asylum seekers as possible, prioritizing their detention and removal over that of convicted criminals.”
David Bier, the report’s author and Cato’s director of immigration studies, told HuffPost that similar dynamics could play out in Trump’s second term.
“Right now, it seems like they’re just trying to arrest anybody they can, put up numbers, and send a message, or put the media blitz on it,” Bier said.
“I expect that they will be releasing convicted criminals and public safety threats,” he added. “I suspect that they already are, and they’re just not telling anyone.”
One confounding variable is Trump’s efforts to create more space for immigrants to be detained. He recently announced he would pursue the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center — apparently catching Pentagon officials by surprise, and raising concerns about denial of access to legal representation for undocumented people on the base, among a slew of other issues.
U.S. Northern Command also recently announced that Buckley Space Force Base, in Aurora, Colorado, had been approved to “enable [ICE] to stage and process criminal aliens within the US for an operation taking place in Colorado.”
Those actions could potentially create tens of thousands more beds to be used for detaining undocumented people pending deportation.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Another open question: How dramatically the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention of undocumented people for mere allegations of criminal activity — including something as innocuous as alleged shoplifting — will increase the population of detained undocumented people. Trump recently signed the bill, which received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, into law.
One widely–reportedmemo drafted by ICE officials during the Biden administration noted that the bill’s detention requirements went beyond ICE’s current capabilities. “If supplemental funding is not received and ICE remains at its current bed capacity, the agency would not have the detention capacity to accommodate the immediate arrest and detention of noncitizens convicted or charged with property crimes. [ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations] anticipates that tens of thousands of noncitizens would need to be released by the end of the fiscal year, resulting in the potential release of public safety threats.”
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment.