The figures do not include arrests made by Border Patrol, which has launched aggressive immigration operations in several cities in recent months.
By Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley
More than a third of the roughly 220,000 people arrested by ICE officers in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal histories, according to new data.
The data, which includes ICE arrests from Jan. 20 to Oct. 15, shows that nearly 75,000 peoplewith no criminal records have been swept up in immigration operations that the president and his top officials have said would target murderers, rapists and gang members.
“It contradicts what the administration has been saying about people who are convicted criminals and that they are going after the worst of the worst,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
The figures provide the most revealing look to date into the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They were shared by the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, which obtained them through a lawsuit brought against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The data is compiled by an internal ICE office that handles arrest, detention and deportation data. The administration stopped regularly posting detailed information on ICE arrests in January.
For arrestees with criminal histories, the data doesn’t distinguish between those with a history of minor offenses and those who have committed more serious crimes, like rape and murder, whom the administration has said it is targeting.
And the figures do not include arrests made by Border Patrol, which has launched aggressive immigration operations in several cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina. Border Patrol sweeps are currently underway in New Orleans.
Border Patrol and ICE are both under the Department of Homeland Security but they are two different agencies with two different missions. Border Patrol agents typically operate along the southern and northern borders, but recently hundreds have been sent into the interior of the United States to track down undocumented immigrants.
“That is the black boxthat we know nothing about,” Ruiz Soto said. “How many arrests is Border Patrol doing? How many of those are leading to removals and under what conditions?”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE field offices have been under intense pressure to ramp up arrests.