Criminal Doesn't Mean Violent: What's Actually Inside ICE's Numbers?

September 21, 2026|QLP News Room

Our first piece in this series showed that roughly 60% of people ICE arrested during the first year of the second Trump administration had some kind of criminal charge or conviction, and that fewer than 14% of that group had one for a violent offense. This piece goes one level deeper: what's actually inside that "60%"? Homicide and jaywalking are both, technically, "a criminal history." Knowing which one you're looking at changes what the number means — and it's the same confusion behind claims that everyone ICE arrests is automatically a "criminal" because they're undocumented.

What We Can and Can't Verify Here

Documented fact, with an important limitation: The most detailed public offense breakdown available comes from the internal DHS document obtained by CBS News in February 2026, covering roughly 393,000 ICE arrests between January 2025 and January 2026. Journalists who reviewed it reported specific counts for several offense categories. We were not able to independently verify every category CBS did not report on, and the categories that have been publicly reported don't add up to the full 60% — meaning a meaningful share of "criminal" arrests fall into categories this specific document's public coverage didn't break out. We're showing you exactly what's been reported, and flagging clearly where the picture is incomplete, rather than guessing at the rest.

E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse exterior in Washington, D.C.

A Federal Courthouse
Every offense category below started as a charge filed somewhere like this — the difference between a charge and a conviction is exactly what these numbers don't always show. Photo: public domain architecture, photo CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Offense Categories That Have Been Reported

Documented fact: As a share of the roughly 393,000 total arrests in that period:

Assault: 10.9% (43,000 people)
DUI: 7.6% (about 29,900 people) — see our full breakdown of what's inside DUI vs. "other traffic offenses"
Dangerous drugs: 5.7% (about 22,400 people)
Sexual assault: 1.4% (5,400 people)
Burglary: 1.3% (about 5,100 people)
Robbery: 0.7% (2,700 people)
Homicide: 0.5% (2,100 people)
Kidnapping: 0.3% (1,100 people)
Arson: 0.1% (350 people)

Added together, these reported categories account for about 28% of all arrests — well under the 60% total with any criminal charge or conviction. The remaining roughly 32 percentage points are distributed across categories this specific reporting didn't itemize: other drug offenses, weapons charges, property crimes other than burglary, document and identity fraud, other traffic offenses, immigration-related criminal charges (illegal entry, illegal reentry — explained in the next piece in this series), and other categories ICE's own data separately tracks. We're not going to estimate numbers for those categories that we can't source to a specific document; when we can obtain and verify a fuller published table, we'll update this piece.

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"I.C.E. Imperialist COP OUTS EVERYWHERE" Sticker

Once you see how thin the "violent" slice of these numbers actually is, "Abolish Ice" stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a reasonable response to the data. This Abolish Ice Sticker spells the acronym out for anyone who still thinks "criminal" means what the headlines imply.

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Offenses Aren't People

Documented fact: TRAC, which independently receives and analyzes ICE's underlying data, notes a methodological point worth understanding before reading any offense-category table: ICE's own records track charges and convictions, and one person can have several. TRAC's approach is to classify each detained person by their single most serious offense, specifically to avoid a person with, say, one DUI and one assault charge being counted twice and inflating category totals. Not every source follows that convention. When a table doesn't specify whether it's counting people or counting charges, the safest assumption is that it's counting charges — which will always produce a higher, and less directly interpretable, number than a per-person count.

ICE officers on an enforcement operation, faces obscured

ICE Officers on Duty
Each arrest behind these offense-category numbers gets logged individually — and one person can rack up multiple charges, which is exactly what TRAC's "most serious offense" methodology exists to correct for. Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What "Nonviolent" Is Doing in This Debate

Interpretation: As we noted in the previous piece, DHS has objected to the word "nonviolent" being applied to offenses like drug trafficking, child exploitation material, fraud, or human smuggling — correctly, in the narrow sense that "not legally classified as a violent crime" is not the same claim as "not a serious crime." Burglary and DUI are genuinely categorized as nonviolent offenses in most legal frameworks, and they're also genuinely capable of causing serious harm. Holding both of those things as true at once — a category label isn't a severity judgment, but severity still matters — is the only way to read this data honestly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does "assault" always mean a serious violent attack?

No. "Assault" is a broad legal category that spans everything from a bar fight resulting in a felony conviction to a low-level misdemeanor charge for a shove or a verbal threat with physical gesture, depending on the state. The public data reported here doesn't distinguish felony from misdemeanor assault, which is a real limit on what this specific number can tell you.

Why doesn't this article include a full table of every ICE offense category?

Because we could only source specific numbers for the categories listed above from verified reporting on the DHS document. We'd rather show you an honest, incomplete picture with the gaps labeled than present estimated numbers as if they were documented ones.

Is "criminal" the same as "convicted"?

Not in ICE's usage. As explained in the first piece in this series, ICE's "criminal" classifications include people with pending charges that haven't resulted in a conviction. The offense categories here include both charges and convictions together, per how they were reported.

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Nine offense categories, and only three of them (assault, sexual assault, homicide) are unambiguously violent — the rest is drugs, DUI, burglary, robbery, kidnapping, and arson getting swept into the same "criminal" bucket. This one from our Anti-Ice Stickers collection says exactly what the data supports.

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