ICE Says They're Arresting Criminals. What Does "Criminal" Actually Mean?

September 21, 2026|QLP News Room

"ICE is only arresting criminals." It's one of the most repeated lines in the current immigration debate, from both defenders and critics of enforcement policy, and it usually gets said as if "criminal" is a single, settled category. It isn't. When ICE calls someone a "criminal alien" — a phrase we break down in detail in our companion piece on what the label actually covers — that word can mean a person convicted of homicide, or it can mean a person whose only offense on record is crossing the border without authorization — itself a low-level federal offense, not a violent one. Both get the same word. This article explains what ICE's own classification system actually contains, using ICE's own data and definitions, before any of the political claims built on top of it make sense.

The Three Buckets ICE Actually Uses

Documented fact: ICE sorts the people it arrests and detains into three broad categories:

Convicted criminals — someone with at least one criminal conviction on record, of any kind. ICE's own methodology note (via TRAC's review of ICE data) states this can range "all the way down to a purely immigration violation… or a violation which results only in a fine, such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, or driving with a broken taillight."
Pending criminal charges — someone charged with a crime but not (yet, or ever) convicted of it. An arrest and a charge are not a conviction; the case may be dismissed, reduced, or the person may be acquitted.
Other immigration violators — someone with no criminal charge or conviction of any kind. Their only immigration-law issue is a civil one: being in the country without authorization, an overstayed visa, or a similar status violation. This is not a crime in the way most people use that word — see our companion piece on what makes something a civil versus a criminal immigration violation.

That third bucket is doing a lot of work in this debate, because ICE's public shorthand — "criminal alien," "convicted criminal," even just "criminal" — routinely gets applied to people in all three categories without distinguishing between them.

How Big Is Each Bucket, Right Now

Documented fact: According to TRAC (the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which receives and publishes ICE's own detention data), as of July 11, 2026, ICE held 65,765 people in detention. Of those, 46,436 — 70.6% — had no criminal conviction of any kind. That is consistent with TRAC's snapshots across 2025 and 2026: 71.5% with no conviction as of September 21, 2025 (59,762 total detained), and 70.8% as of April 4, 2026 (60,311 total detained). The share without a conviction has stayed remarkably stable across a period when the total detained population nearly doubled.

How That Balance Has Shifted Over Time

Documented fact: The share of arrestees with no criminal record has not stayed flat — it has risen steadily as enforcement expanded. Tracking people arrested with no criminal record or pending charge, as a share of everyone arrested in each period: 14.7% in February 2025 (the administration's first full month), rising to 34.6% by September 2025, and reaching 42.7% by January 2026, per FactCheck.org's analysis of government arrest data. Measured a different way — the share with no criminal record among people arrested in each rolling three-month window — the same trend shows up: 21.9% in the first three months, 34.2% in the second three months, 40.5% in the three months ending mid-October 2025. Both measures point the same direction: as ICE has arrested more people overall, a larger share of those additional arrests have been of people with no criminal record at all, not a stable or shrinking share.

A Test Case: The 70% Claim

Allegation / public claim: In January 2026, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that "70% of them have committed or have charges against them on violent crimes," referring to people in ICE detention.

Official portrait of Kristi Noem, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security

Secretary Kristi Noem
Noem's January 2026 statement that "70% of them have committed or have charges against them on violent crimes" is the specific claim PolitiFact rated False. Photo: Tia Dufour / DHS, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Documented fact: PolitiFact checked that claim against the underlying data and rated it False. As of the date closest to Noem's statement (January 7, 2026), 68,990 people were in ICE detention; 52% had either a criminal conviction or a pending criminal charge (roughly 26% each). Looking at everyone detained at any point between January 20, 2025 and October 15, 2025 — a larger, cumulative figure — 64% had a conviction or pending charge. Neither number is 70%, and more importantly, neither number is about violent crime: of people held in ICE custody, only about 5% had a violent-crime conviction, according to a Cato Institute analysis of the same underlying data (The New York Times put the figure at 7% using a similar approach). The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to PolitiFact's request for comment on this specific claim.

This is the recurring pattern in this dataset: a "70%" figure is real and appears in multiple places, but it consistently describes people with a conviction or a pending charge of any kind — not people convicted of violence. Collapsing those two things into one sentence is where the public claim and the underlying data part ways. It's the same collapsing that shows up whenever someone claims ICE is just taking "murderers and rapists" off the streets — a framing worth checking against the actual offense breakdown before repeating it.

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A Closer Look: What's Actually Inside the "Criminal" Numbers

Documented fact: In February 2026, CBS News obtained an internal DHS document — not previously public — covering ICE arrests during Trump's first year back in office (roughly January 2025 through January 2026), a period covering nearly 400,000 arrests. That document allows a rare, itemized look inside the "criminal" numbers rather than a single top-line percentage:

60% of arrestees had some criminal charge or conviction, of any kind, at any severity
Fewer than 14% had a charge or conviction specifically for a violent offense
Roughly 40% had no criminal record at all — their only issue was a civil immigration violation

Broken into specific offense counts, the document reportedly showed: 43,000 people with an assault charge or conviction, 5,400 with sexual assault, 2,700 with robbery, 2,100 with homicide, 1,100 with kidnapping, and 350 with arson. (These categories are not mutually exclusive with the conviction-vs-pending-charge distinction above — a person can appear in an offense category based on a pending charge that never becomes a conviction. See our companion piece on what's actually inside ICE's offense categories for the full breakdown, including nonviolent offenses like drug possession, DUI, and traffic violations, which make up the bulk of the "60% with a record" figure.)

ICE officer overseeing an immigration enforcement operation

An ICE Enforcement Operation
The itemized breakdown behind the "60% have a record" figure comes from arrests like these — logged, charged, and sorted into categories long before any public percentage gets quoted. Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Government's Response

Government response: DHS disputed the framing of that CBS reporting, not the underlying numbers. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote: "Drug trafficking, Distribution of child pornography, burglary, fraud, DUI, embezzlement, solicitation of a minor, human smuggling are all categorized as 'non violent crimes.'" The official ICE account made the same point, in an argument consistent with DHS's broader public messaging on its first-year arrests: "So-called 'non-violent' offenders include individuals charged with drug trafficking, distribution of child pornography, burglary, fraud, DUI, embezzlement, solicitation of a minor, human smuggling, and more." Both used a separate figure — "nearly 70% of criminal aliens detained by ICE have pending charges or prior convictions" — which is a real number, but note it describes only people already classified as "criminal aliens" (i.e., people who already have a charge or conviction), not the full arrested population. That is a different, narrower denominator than the 60%-of-all-arrests figure CBS reported, and conflating the two produces the appearance of a bigger contradiction than actually exists — exactly the kind of mismatch this cluster's piece on the denominator problem is built to untangle.

DHS also pushed back using a specific case rather than a statistic: McLaughlin cited Edward Hernandez, arrested by ICE in Virginia, described as an alleged MS-13 member who "confessed to murdering 5 people in El Salvador" but who is classified as "non-criminal" in U.S. data because he has no U.S. conviction. Interpretation: that case illustrates a real limitation of conviction-based classification — foreign conduct with no U.S. court record won't show up as a U.S. conviction — but a single case, however serious, describes an individual, not a rate. It doesn't change what the aggregate numbers above show about the arrested population as a whole.

A dissenting analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies made a related argument: that CBS's framing reflects "a deep misunderstanding of immigration law" by treating offenses like drug trafficking or child exploitation material as something other than serious threats simply because they're not classified as "violent" in the strict legal sense. Interpretation: that's a fair critique of the word "nonviolent" as a stand-in for "not serious" — the two aren't the same thing, and readers shouldn't assume they are. It's a different argument, though, from a claim that the underlying counts (43,000 assault, 5,400 sexual assault, and so on) are wrong; no source in this reporting disputes the counts themselves.

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What This Means — and What It Doesn't

Interpretation: None of this tells you whether current ICE enforcement is too broad, too narrow, or correctly targeted — that's a policy judgment, not a data question. What the record does show is that "criminal" is being used as a single word to describe a wide range of situations: a homicide conviction, a pending shoplifting charge, and a civil visa overstay can all get folded into public statements about "criminals" and "criminal aliens." The specific numbers above are why this cluster keeps coming back to what's actually being measured, and out of what total — because the same underlying dataset can produce a "70%" headline or a "14%" headline depending on which slice of it gets reported.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is "criminal alien" a legal term or a political one?

It's ICE's own operational term, used in its public statistics and press statements, but it isn't a single legal category with one fixed meaning — ICE applies it to convicted criminals, people with pending charges, and in some public statements, to people who are simply removable under civil immigration law. The word doesn't tell you which one you're looking at without checking the underlying data. Our piece on what "criminal alien" actually means goes deeper on this.

Does "no criminal conviction" mean someone did nothing wrong?

Not necessarily, and not automatically the opposite either. It means exactly what it says: no criminal conviction on record. That can describe someone with a pending charge that hasn't been resolved, someone whose only issue is a civil immigration violation, or someone with a foreign criminal history that never produced a U.S. conviction, as DHS pointed out with the Hernandez case above. "No conviction" is a legal status, not a character judgment in either direction.

Why do DHS's numbers and independent trackers' numbers sometimes disagree?

Partly different snapshot dates, partly different populations (everyone ever detained during a period vs. everyone detained on one specific day), and partly different definitions of what counts as "criminal" (any conviction ever, vs. conviction or pending charge, vs. violent conviction specifically). Precise comparisons require matching all three before comparing the percentage.

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