The Trump administration has spent more than a year telling the American public that its immigration crackdown is surgical — aimed squarely at violent criminals, gang members, and national security threats. The government’s own enforcement records tell a different story.
New findings published Tuesday by the Deportation Data Project, a research initiative run by academics and lawyers at UC Berkeley and UCLA, draw on ICE arrest data obtained through federal court litigation to document a sweeping shift in who is actually being detained. The numbers are blunt: arrests of immigrants with no criminal conviction rose 770 percent in the first year of Trump’s second term. Street arrests — carried out in neighborhoods, at immigration check-ins, and outside courthouses — climbed by more than 1,000 percent, according to NBC News.
The data covers arrests through March 10 of this year.
The Deportation Data Project does not rely on estimates or surveys. It files Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against ICE to obtain the agency’s internal enforcement records, then publishes them in full alongside its analysis, NBC News explains. When the Department of Homeland Security disputed the findings this week — calling the research “cherry-picked” and designed to “peddle a false narrative” — the project’s response was direct: the dataset came from ICE itself.
“These are ICE’s own records of who is arrested, detained, and deported,” the project stated.
The administration’s standard counter-claim is that 70 percent of its arrests involve people with criminal histories. That figure has not held up under independent review. An analysis by FactCheck.org found that the share of ICE detainees with criminal convictions fell from 64 percent in December 2024 — Biden’s final full month in office — to roughly 29 percent by January 2026, while the number of people detained with no convictions or pending charges at all climbed from 869 to more than 25,000 in that same span.
The Cato Institute, whose researchers obtained nonpublic ICE data through separate channels, reached nearly identical conclusions. Per Cato’s findings, nearly three in four people booked into ICE custody since October 2025 had no criminal conviction. Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction on record — and researchers noted that even some of those cases involved minor altercations rather than serious felonies.
Detention as a Tool of Last Resort — Used First
David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and an assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, identified a consequence of the arrest surge that goes beyond the numbers: detention itself is ending cases before they can be fought.
“Even as ICE has arrested more people who likely could win their cases and stay in the United States, arrests have been ending more often in deportation,” Hausman said in a statement Tuesday. “One big factor is that detention causes people to give up on their cases.”
That observation is supported by a separate report from the American Immigration Council, which found that discretionary releases from detention fell 87 percent by the end of November 2025, and that by that point, 14.3 people were being deported directly from detention for every one person released pending a hearing.
In practical terms, that means people who entered ICE custody with valid legal claims — pending asylum petitions, long-term residency, family ties to U.S. citizens — are accepting deportation rather than endure months of detention with no clear endpoint.
The Reach of Enforcement
One persistent argument from the administration is that the surge is concentrated in so-called sanctuary cities, where federal officials say local governments obstruct enforcement. The Deportation Data Project addressed that directly.
Graeme Blair, the project’s co-director and a political science professor at UCLA, said the arrest data show no such geographic concentration. Even during the highly publicized Minneapolis operations, those arrests accounted for only 15 percent of street arrests nationwide during that same period. The enforcement expansion, Blair said, is national in scope.
The geographic spread carries particular significance for immigrant communities in New England, including Massachusetts, where Haitian residents holding Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, or pending legal proceedings have reported avoiding immigration check-ins and court appearances out of fear of arrest — moves that can, paradoxically, accelerate deportation.
The Brennan Center for Justice examined the broader law enforcement trade-offs involved in meeting the administration’s arrest quotas. To staff the surge, the administration reassigned nearly one in five FBI agents from criminal investigations to immigration enforcement, along with roughly half of DEA agents and two-thirds of ATF agents — pulling those resources away from counterterrorism, drug trafficking, and violent crime work.
Meanwhile, the detention infrastructure required to hold the expanded population has grown faster than staffing and oversight. The American Immigration Council reported that 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record, with overcrowding, substandard medical care, and documented violations of detention standards across facilities.
The Deportation Data Project says it will continue publishing updated ICE records as litigation produces new data releases.
Sources: Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley/UCLA); FactCheck.org; Cato Institute; American Immigration Council; Brennan Center for Justice; NBC News.
