The Claim
"Criminal alien" — used constantly in official statements and headlines as if it's a precise, self-explanatory category.
What the Terms Actually Mean
"Alien" is the statutory term for any noncitizen. "Criminal" is doing the ambiguous work: as covered in Article 1 of this series, it can mean a homicide conviction or a pending shoplifting charge that never resolves.
The term "alien" itself is drawn directly from 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(3), the statutory definition Congress uses for any person who is not a U.S. citizen or national — it isn't a phrase invented by any particular administration, though its use in political messaging has become more charged in recent years.
What the Data Measure
ICE's own "criminal alien" statistics fold together people with convictions of any severity and people with only pending charges — without a court finding of guilt — into one label, the same folding-together our piece on whether ICE is "only going after criminals" tracks at the aggregate level.
That gap matters because ICE's own quarterly reporting to Congress uses "criminal alien" as a single line-item total, without a parallel breakdown by offense severity in the same release — a reader has to go digging through separate documents, like the internal breakdown reported by CBS News covered in Article 1, to see what's actually inside that number.
ICE Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's headquarters building, photographed in 2009. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
What the Evidence Shows
Documented fact: DHS itself has used "nearly 70% of criminal aliens detained by ICE have pending charges or prior convictions" as a public statistic — note that this specific figure describes a population already labeled "criminal," not the full detained or arrested population, and it explicitly includes pending charges alongside convictions. That same reporting period also showed that of the roughly 30% without a pending charge or conviction, most had either an administrative immigration violation or a closed case with no resulting conviction — categories a casual reader would likely not associate with the word "criminal" at all.
What's Supported
The term is a real ICE operational classification, not a media invention. It's also true that some people carrying the label do have serious violent convictions, documented in named cases DHS has publicized, which is part of why the term has real, non-fabricated content behind it in at least some cases.
U.S. Department of Justice Building
The DOJ headquarters in Washington, D.C., home to agencies that help define and enforce the statutes discussed here. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
What's Missing or Misleading
The label alone tells you nothing about offense severity, whether the person was convicted or merely charged, or whether the underlying issue was a civil immigration matter that got bundled into the same reporting category — precisely the loose usage our piece on the "they're all criminals because they came here illegally" claim documents from the other direction. Two people can carry the identical label with wildly different underlying facts.
Government/Other Response
ICE has not, to our knowledge, published a routine public breakdown separating "criminal alien" by conviction-vs-pending-charge status at the same time it uses the term in press statements — readers have to cross-reference separate ICE newsroom releases to get that distinction, as this series has done. When pressed by reporters on specific cases, ICE spokespeople have generally directed questions to individual case files rather than releasing an agency-wide accuracy audit of the label itself.
Bottom Line
The term itself isn't false, but it's engineered to sound more specific than it is. Always ask which of the three categories from Article 1 a given "criminal alien" statistic is actually describing. Reporters and readers alike should treat the phrase as a starting point for a question, not an answer in itself.
Quick Questions
Does "criminal alien" mean the person was convicted of something?
Not necessarily. ICE's own statistics group convictions together with pending charges that haven't been resolved, so the label alone doesn't tell you which one applies.
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Related Reading
ICE Says They're Arresting Criminals. What Does "Criminal" Actually Mean?: the original three-tier breakdown this label depends on.
"ICE Is Only Going After Criminals." What Do the Numbers Actually Show?: the same three-tier confusion applied to a specific enforcement claim.
"They're All Criminals Because They Came Here Illegally." Is That Actually How Immigration Law Works?: the parallel "illegal equals criminal" conflation in casual usage.
Sources: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, public statements; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, newsroom; 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(3); this series, Article 1.
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