ICE is arresting more non-criminals than ever as Trump pushes for more enforcement
The number of people without a criminal record being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and held in detention has jumped 800 percent since January, as officials face pressure to boost numbers, according to reports.
This enforcement drive has resulted in 51,302 people being imprisoned in ICE centers as of the start of June; marking the first time that detention centers held over 50,000 immigrants at once.
Less than one in three (30 percent) of these detainees are convicted criminals, with the remainder pending criminal charges or arrested for non-criminal immigration offenses, such as overstaying a visa or unauthorized entry to the the country.
The latest data is from June 1, published by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Since January, when the Trump administration entered office, ICE has not published clear and official figures on arrests or deportations.
People held in immigration detention are either arrested by Customs and Border Protection, either at the US border or within 100 miles, or by ICE.
But among detained immigrants who have been arrested by ICE and not CBP, the number of non-criminal arrests has shot up.
Before the Trump administration entered office in mid-January, the proportion of non-criminal detainees arrested by ICE (meaning people without a criminal conviction or pending charges) was just 6 percent of all ICE arrests, 850 people.
This was largely in line with figures over Joe Biden's presidency, where non-criminal ICE arrests rarely made up more than 10 percent of detainees.
Yet since President Trump's inauguration on January 20, this figure has soared, with 7,781 detainees arrested by ICE without a criminal history or pending charges.
This makes up one in four (23 percent) of all detained immigrants arrested by ICE; an increase of over 800 percent, and the highest levels recorded since at least 2019, as far as records go back.
At the same time, just four in ten detainees who had been arrested by ICE were convicted criminals, latest data shows; the lowest level recorded, and a 20 percent drop proportionally from January.
This substantial shift in non-criminal immigration arrests comes as enforcement officials increasingly conduct raids at workplaces, a reversal of the Biden-era ban.
Meanwhile, ICE is facing ongoing pressure from the government to boost numbers; with Homeland Security secretary Kirsti Noem reportedly ordering targets of 3,000 arrests a day.
And just this week, Trump demanded ICE "expand efforts to detain and deport illegal Aliens' in Democratic-run cities, and reversed an order to protect farmworkers from raids just days earlier.
'The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos,' he wrote in a lengthy tirade on Truth Social.
The lack of transparency over ICE arrests and other statistics under the Trump administration has also made it harder to identify trends in immigration enforcement.
But internal ICE documents seen by CNN suggest that immigration enforcement has had little focus on violent criminals.
Just one in ten ICE detainees from October to May have been convicted of serious crimes — including murder, rape, assault or robbery, according to CNN.
Even among all detainees with a criminal conviction, who make up around a third of the 185,000 ICE detainees over this period, the vast majority, around 75 percent, are for non-serious crimes.
These non-serious crimes include traffic and other offenses, but are included under an umbrella label when ICE refers to targeting immigrants with a criminal conviction.
The Trump administration's anti-immigrant rhetoric has centered around criminal convictions and gang affiliations, not least with the unprecedented deportation of around 245 Venezuelans to El Salvador over alleged links to the Tren de Aragua gang.
The increasing number of non-criminals being detained by ICE, in addition to the low prioritization for serious crimes (just 9 percent of all detainees), is a concern amid the wider push to ramp up immigration enforcement at all costs.
In fact, though deportation has been front-and-center of the Trump agenda, the numbers are not skyrocketing on the surface; and border patrol deportations are going down, since fewer migrants are attempting to cross into the US.
While the latter should be a positive sign for the Trump administration, it may make officials desperate to find higher deportation numbers to report – regardless of immigrants' criminal histories.
'This push on numbers — exclusive of whether or not the job is being done right — is very concerning,' said Sarah Saldaña, former ICE director under Obama, told the New York Times.
'You're going to have people who are being pushed to the limit, who in a rush may not get things right, including information on a person's status.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ice raids leave crops unharvested at California farms: ‘We need the labor'
Lisa Tate is a sixth-generation farmer in Ventura county, California, an area that produces billions of dollars worth of fruit and vegetables each year, much of it hand-picked by immigrants in the US illegally. Tate knows the farms around her well. And she says she can see with her own eyes how raids carried out by agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in the area's fields earlier this month, part of Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, have frightened off workers. 'In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,' she said in an interview. 'If 70% of your workforce doesn't show up, 70% of your crop doesn't get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don't want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.' In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura county into the state's central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the Ice raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up. That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said. One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but that day he had just 17. Most economists and politicians acknowledge that many US agricultural workers are in the country illegally, but say a sharp reduction in their numbers could have devastating impacts on the food supply chain and farm-belt economies. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the US were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said. 'This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,' Holtz-Eakin said. Over a third of US vegetables and over three-quarters of the country's fruits and nuts are grown in California, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The state's farms and ranches generated nearly $60bn in agricultural sales in 2023. Of the four immigrant farmworkers Reuters spoke to, two are in the country illegally. These two spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of being arrested by Ice. One, aged 54, has worked in US agricultural fields for 30 years and has a wife and children in the country. He said most of his colleagues have stopped showing up for work. 'If they show up to work, they don't know if they will ever see their family again,' he said. The other worker in the country illegally said: 'basically, we wake up in the morning scared. We worry about the sun, the heat, and now a much bigger problem – many not returning home. I try not to get into trouble on the street. Now, whoever gets arrested for any reason gets deported.' To be sure, some farmworker community groups said many workers were still returning to the fields, despite the raids, out of economic necessity. The days following a raid may see decreased attendance in the field, but the workers soon return because they have no other sources of income, five groups told Reuters. Workers are also taking other steps to reduce their exposure to immigration agents, like carpooling with people with legal status to work or sending US citizen children to the grocery store, the groups said. Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that Ice raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were 'taking very good, long-time workers away' from those sectors, 'with those jobs being almost impossible to replace'. Trump later told reporters: 'Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.' He added: 'They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be great.' He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted. Trump has always stood up for farmers, said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly in response to a request for comment on the impact of the Ice raids to farms. 'He will continue to strengthen our agricultural industry and boost exports while keeping his promise to enforce our immigration laws,' she said. Bernard Yaros, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, a nonpartisan global economics advisory firm, said in a report published on 26 June that native-born workers tend not to fill the void left by immigrant workers who have left. 'Unauthorized immigrants tend to work in different occupations than those who are native-born,' he said. Ice operations in California's farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California. 'Nobody feels safe when they hear the word Ice, even the documented people. We know that the neighborhood is full of a combination of those with and without documents,' Tesch said. 'If things are ripe, such as our neighbors have bell peppers here, (if) they don't harvest within two or three days, the crop is sunburned or over mature,' said Tesch. 'We need the labor.'
The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Trump's aid cuts and development: the global majority deserve justice, not charity
When one door closes, you would hope that another opens. As USAID was formally shut down on Monday, a once-in-a-decade development financing conference was kicking off in Seville. But while initially intended to move the world closer to its ambitious 2030 sustainable development goals, it now looks more like an attempt to prevent a reversal of the progress already made. A study published in the Lancet predicted that Donald Trump's aid cuts could claim more than 14 million lives by 2030, a third of them among children. For many poor countries, the scale of the shock would be similar to that of a major war, the authors found. More than four-fifths of the US agency's programmes have been cut, with surviving projects folded into the state department. The US was by far the world's largest donor to global development – though its contributions were a fraction of the G7 target of 0.7% of GDP. Yet the damage does not end there. Its move encouraged others to follow suit. The UK, Germany and France are slashing their aid budgets to spend more on defence. Oxfam says that the collective retrenchment by G7 nations is the biggest aid cut since 1960, with spending 26% lower in 2026 than it was last year. Don't expect China or the Gulf states to fill this gaping hole. It is not just grim news for aid recipients. It bodes ill for all. It would be naive to imagine that aid is a high‑mindedly altruistic endeavour. Just as conflict breeds hunger and poverty, so injustice and deprivation breed instability and a more dangerous world. Slashing health budgets also increases the risks of another global pandemic. Developing countries hoped that the UN- and Spanish-hosted International Conference on Financing for Development would at least see a willingness to tackle an international financial system stacked against the global majority. Instead, the US, UK, EU and others shamefully acted as blockers, watering down the language on a UN intergovernmental process to tackle the debt crisis. The US reportedly proposed 400 amendments across a multitude of issues to the conference's outcome document before pulling out entirely. Others will need to be held to their too-limited commitments. More than two-fifths of the global population live in low income countries which are in debt distress or close to it. Many poor African nations are spending more on debt financing than they do on health or education. Contrary to popular perception – and any sense of justice and decency – wealth is flowing from them to developed nations. The UN says that servicing debt cost developing countries $847bn last year, rising to $947bn this year. Yet developed countries are choosing to shore up an unfair global financial system. The keenness of the UK and others to focus on private sector‑oriented solutions looks like better news for the City than developing nations. The promise that private finance would turn 'billions to trillions' was enthusiastically promoted a decade ago, yet largely failed to materialise. Despite the enduring inequality, the last few decades saw extraordinary progress in areas such as cutting child mortality. For all their flaws, USAID-funded programmes alone saved almost 92 million lives over 20 years. We know that remarkable leaps in human wellbeing are possible. We will all regret it if, in this time of conflict and crisis, we slam the door shut on such advances and block out the call of justice.
The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump team threatens to prosecute CNN over reporting on Ice-tracking app
Donald Trump and administration officials have threatened CNN over what they said was its promotion of a new app that allows users to track and try to avoid Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents. Speaking to reporters in Florida on a trip to visit a new Ice detention center in Everglades, dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz', Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said her department and the Department of Justice were looking at prosecuting CNN over its reporting on the app, called IceBlock. 'We're working with Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them,' Noem said, 'because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations. We're going to actually go after them and prosecute them. What they're doing is illegal.' Trump joined in, saying the news network – a frequent target of his ire – should also be prosecuted for what he said were 'false reports on the attack on Iran', referring to the leak of a Pentagon assessment that suggested US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities did not destroy the core components of the country's nuclear program and had likely only set the program back by months. 'They were totally obliterated,' Trump countered. 'Our people have to be celebrated, [and] not come home to, 'What do you mean we didn't hit the targets?'' The comments came hours after Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, also criticized CNN for its reporting on the IceBlock app. 'It's disgusting,' Homan said during an appearance on rightwing commentator Benny Johnson's internet show. 'I can't believe we live in a world where the men and women in law enforcement are the bad guys. It's already a dangerous job.' Homan had been asked about the app, which was created to report sightings of Ice agents in any given area. Software developer Joshua Aaron recently told CNN that he'd launched the app 'when I saw what was happening in this country'. 'I wanted to do something to fight back,' Aaron said, telling the network that the administration's deportation efforts were, to him, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. 'We're literally watching history repeat itself,' Aaron said. Homan also suggested CNN was complicit in putting federal law enforcement in danger. 'This is horrendous that a national media outlet would be out there trying to forecast law enforcement operations,' he said. 'I think DoJ needs to look at this. They're crossing that line.' He added: 'We need to send a strong message that we need to protect the law enforcement officers.' Trump is engaged in a number of lawsuits with media companies, including legal action against CBS/Paramount Global over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which, the lawsuit alleges, was deceptively edited to favor experts and other legal observers say the edit was standard journalistic practice. A lawsuit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos for stating he had been found liable for 'rape' in a civil case, when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse, was settled after ABC agreed to pay $15m to Trump's foundation. The threat over the IceBlock app comes as Noem is seen on US television networks promoting a customs and border patrol app that encourages illegal immigrants to register with the agency and leave the country.
