President Donald Trump has promised to deport “The Wowl of the Wildest”. He often talks about public appearances about countless “dangerous criminals” – among them killers, rapists and children’s predators – from all over the world, he says he has entered the United States under the US administration illegally. He promises to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history to protect citizens who obey the law from the violent threats he says he poses.
But government data on continuing detainees tell a different story.
There has been an increase in arrests from immigration and the application of customs since Trump began his second term, with reports of raids across the country. Yet the greater part of the people detained by ice have no penalty. Of those who do so, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes, contrast with the freezing nightmare that Trump describes to support his border security program.
“There is a deep interruption between rhetoric and reality,” says Ahilane Arulanantam, Director of the Faculty of Law and Policy of Immigration Law and Policy of the Faculty of Law. “This administration, as well as in the previous Trump administration, they constantly claim that they continue after the worse of the worst and just talk about the implementation of immigration, as if everything is connected after violence, dangerous people with extensive criminal history. And yet predominantly, these are people who are not sentenced to any senior history.
Look at the numbers
The latest ice statistics show that since June 29 there were 57,861 people detained by ice, 41 495 – 71.7% – of whom there were no penal sentences. This includes 14 318 people with pending criminal charges and 27,177 who are the subject of immigration, but do not have some criminal sentences or pending criminal charges.
Each detainee is assigned a level of threat of ice on a scale of 1 to 3, with the highest unit. Those without criminal record are classified as “no level of ice threat”. As of June 23, the last data available, 84% of people detained in 201 facilities across the country have not received a level of threat. Another 7% are rated as a threat of level 1, 4% are level 2 and 5% are level 3.
“President Trump has partly justified this immigration program by making false allegations that migrants lead to violence in the United States, and this is simply not true,” said Lauren-Bruck Eisen, senior director of the Brennan Justice Center. “There is no research and evidence that support his allegations.”
Trisha McClaplin, Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Homeland Security, called the assessment that ICE is not aimed at immigrants with a criminal record “False” and said that DHS secretary Christie Nom has directed Ice to “focus on She counted the detainees with convictions, as well as those with those who are charged as “criminal illegal aliens.”
Non -public data obtained from the Cato Institute show that as of June 14, 65% of over 204,000 people have been processed in the ice system since the beginning of the fiscal year 2025, which begins on October 1, 2024, have no criminal sentences. Of those with convictions, only 6.9% committed violence, while 53% committed non -violent crimes, which fell into three major categories – immigration, traffic or deputy crime.
The total ice arrests fired in late May after the deputy head of the White House Staff Stephen Miller gives the agency a quota quota of 3000 arrests per day, compared to 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term. Ice arrested nearly 30% more people in May than in April, according to Clearing House Transactional Records, or TRAC. This number has grown again in June, by another 28%.
The CATO Institute found that between February 8 and May 17, the daily average of the “non -criminal” processed in the system varied from 421 to 454. In the next two weeks, at the end of May, this issue increased to 678 and then increased to 927 in the period from 1 to 14 June.
“What you see is this huge increase in people’s retention funding, eliminating people, applying immigration laws,” Eisen said. “And what we see is that many of these people came back to see the original question you asked, these are not people who are dangerous.”
Administration says the focus is on dangerous criminals
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesman, said the administration was intensively focused on eradicating insoluble criminals who are illegally in the country.
“This week alone, the administration conducted a successful operation, rescuing children from the operation of labor at a marijuana facility in California and continued to arrest the worse of the worst -including killers, pedophiles, gang members and rapeers,” she wrote in an email. “Any assumption that the administration is not focused on these dangerous criminals is wrong.”
While most of the detainees have not been convicted of criminals, there are detainees who have committed serious crimes. On Friday, the administration released information about five high -level offenders who were arrested.
During his campaign, Trump pointed out several cases where immigrants in the country were illegally arrested for horrific crimes. Among them: the murder of 22-year-old Lake Riley, a nursing student in Georgia, who was killed last year by an illegal man in the United States. Jose Ibara was found guilty of murder and other crimes in the murder of Riley 2024 and sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of conditional release. Ibara is looking for a new process.
Trump signed the Law on Lake Riley in January, which requires the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of theft and violence crimes.
Immigrants do not lead to violence in the United States, finding studies
However, studies have consistently found that immigrants do not lead to violence in the United States and that they actually commit fewer crimes than born Americans. A working document from 2023 from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, reports that immigrants have had a lower deprivation rates of those born in the United States for 150 years, in fact the percentages have declined since 1960 -according to the document, immigrants are 60% less likely to be enlisted.
Experts say the false rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration causes real harm.
“This causes people in immigrant communities to feel directed and marginalized,” said Arulanantam. “He creates more political and social space for hatred in all its forms, including hate crimes against immigrant communities.”
Eisen noted that the impact extends to other communities.
“All Americans must want safe and thriving communities, and the idea that the United States President makes misleading statements about the truth and the distortion of reality is not the way to ensure public safety,” she said.
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