The One-Sentence Version
ICE is the federal agency that enforces immigration law inside the United States, and since 2025 its arrests have climbed to record levels while the share of the people it arrests who have no criminal record has risen from roughly one in seven to more than half.
What You Need to Know First
The disagreement is partly about facts, not just values
In a February 2026 Marquette Law School national survey, 56 percent of adults favored deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally.[1] A Reuters/Ipsos poll around the same period put support at 61 percent.[2] Broad support for deportation is not in question.
The same Marquette survey asked something else. Respondents were asked whether the United States is mostly deporting immigrants with criminal records or mostly deporting immigrants without them. Fifty-two percent said mostly without; 47 percent said mostly with.[1] Among Republicans, 83 percent said most deportees have criminal records. Among Democrats, 86 percent said most have none.[1]
That is not a difference of opinion about what the country should do. It is a disagreement about what the country is doing, and it can be checked against federal enforcement data. This article checks it.
What ICE is and what it is not
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency inside the Department of Homeland Security. Its officers work in the interior of the country, arresting and detaining people the agency believes are removable and holding them until they are deported or released. It is roughly 23 years old.[3]
Customs and Border Protection is a different agency. CBP works at the border and at ports of entry. When you read about crossings being up or down, that is CBP. When you read about arrests at a workplace, a courthouse, or a check-in appointment in Ohio, that is ICE. The two are often blurred together in coverage, and keeping them apart makes the numbers legible.
Civil violations and criminal ones
This distinction does most of the work in the argument, and it is not intuitive.
Being present in the United States without legal authorization is generally a civil violation, not a crime. Crossing the border unlawfully is a crime, but remaining after a visa expires, for instance, is not. Someone can be deportable without ever having committed a criminal offense, and federal enforcement data tracks this: it separates people arrested on civil immigration violations alone from people with criminal charges or convictions.[4][5]
One further wrinkle matters when reading the agency’s own numbers. ICE’s category of people with “criminal histories” is broader than most readers would assume. It includes immigration offenses such as unlawful entry and re-entry, low-level traffic violations, and charges that never produced a conviction.[6] A person counted in the criminal column has not necessarily been convicted of anything a reader would think of as a crime.
What Actually Happened
The stated standard
Administration officials have described the enforcement effort consistently. The target, they have said repeatedly, is the “worst of the worst.”[6][4] That standard is worth taking seriously, because it is the one the administration chose, and because it is measurable.
What the data shows
Todd Lyons, then ICE’s acting director, testified before Congress in April 2026.[7] The agency’s figures, reported alongside that testimony, showed 457,000 total arrests, of which 176,000, about 39 percent, involved people with no criminal record at all.[6] An internal DHS document obtained by CBS News found that fewer than 14 percent of those arrested had violent criminal records.[8] About 1.9 percent involved someone accused of gang membership.[6]
The share has moved steadily in one direction. People with no criminal record were 14.7 percent of arrests in February 2025, 34.6 percent in September 2025, and 42.7 percent in January 2026.[6] FactCheck.org reviewed the same trend and summarized it in its headline: as ICE arrests increased, a higher portion had no U.S. criminal record.[9]
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank generally sympathetic to limited government and skeptical of federal power, ran its own analysis of detainee data and found 73 percent of ICE detainees had no criminal convictions, and 5 percent had violent convictions.[10] That finding matters partly because of who produced it. This is not a reading unique to the administration’s critics on the left.
By July 2026 the trend had crossed a line. Federal data released in late August showed that July was the first month of the term in which people with civil immigration violations alone made up more than half of everyone arrested.[4][5] ICE arrested an average of more than 800 people a day with no criminal record.[4]
So the factual question the Marquette poll asked has an answer, and it is the one 52 percent of respondents gave. Most people ICE arrests do not have criminal records, and the administration’s own reported figures show it.
The volume, and where it comes from
Total arrests averaged more than 1,580 a day in July. June set a record at 42,637 arrests; July broke it at 49,138.[4] The White House has pushed the agency toward a target of 2,000 arrests a day.[4]
A numerical target changes what an agency does, because the fastest way to hit a daily number is not to find the hardest cases. The July surge came without the publicized city operations of earlier months. Agents turned instead to traffic stops, arrests at airports, and arrests at scheduled immigration check-ins, which are appointments people attend voluntarily because the government instructed them to.[4]
People who were here legally
Separately from arrests, the administration has revoked the temporary legal status of a large number of people who entered the country lawfully. Tallies drawn largely from Migration Policy Institute analysis put the figure between roughly 1.5 and 1.8 million since January 2025, combining terminations of Temporary Protected Status with the end of humanitarian parole programs.[11][12] The Associated Press put the 2025 total above 1.5 million.[12]
Migration Policy Institute analyst Julia Gelatt described the scale as without recent precedent: “I don’t think we’ve ever seen such a huge number of people losing their immigration status all at once.”[11]
Many of these people hold work permits and have lived in the country for years. Their status was always temporary and revocable, which is a fair point and a real one. What changed is how many were revoked at once, and the effect is that people who followed the process became deportable without doing anything differently.
The removals that follow are now accelerating. In late August 2026, deportation flights to Haiti increased from monthly to weekly, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. One August flight carried several children born in the United States, including a one-year-old, accompanying their deported parents to a country the State Department warns Americans not to visit and where the FAA has barred commercial airlines from landing at the capital’s airport.[32]
Training, oversight, and what can be seen
Three changes to how the agency operates happened alongside the increase in volume.
Training was shortened. Records obtained by The Washington Post in March 2026 showed ICE cut its basic training program by about 40 percent, from 580 hours to roughly 340. Firearms training was halved, from 56 hours to 28. More than 900 officers completed the shortened program and were deployed. Graduation rates fell from about 80 percent to 60 percent.[13] Sen. Richard Blumenthal released whistleblower documents describing the same reductions.[14]
An oversight office closed. In May 2026 the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office required by statute that reviews complaints about civil rights abuses and use of force in detention, stopped operating and its public complaint website went offline. The Independent reported that a DHS spokesperson said, “DHS did not shutdown the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman — Congress did,” while an internal email attributed the closure to appropriations, and the text of the bill in question does not require the office to close.[15] This account rests on a single outlet’s reporting, which is worth knowing when weighing it.
Body camera footage became discretionary. ICE is equipping its field officers with body cameras. Under a policy the Associated Press reviewed in August 2026, footage of shootings or encounters causing death or serious injury is released “only after determining it is in the best interests of the agency.” The ICE director can block release indefinitely, and released footage must have officers’ faces, names, and badge numbers redacted.[16]
What It Cost
Deaths in custody
Detention deaths have risen. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights published a joint 72-page report in June 2026 finding at least 52 deaths in ICE custody in the 500 days after the inauguration, with the mortality rate at its highest in more than a decade.[17] A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that most deaths occurred among people held three months or less, and that most involved existing medical conditions that worsened in custody.[18] The population in detention reached roughly 70,000, a record for the agency.[3] The Project On Government Oversight, analyzing the agency’s own inspections website with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, found that ICE published 36.25 percent fewer detention facility inspection reports in 2025 than the year before, while detention numbers climbed.[19]
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for an investigation the day after the HRW report was published.[20]
U.S. citizens
Citizens cannot lawfully be deported, but citizens have been caught up in enforcement. Border czar Tom Homan confirmed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that ICE had made “collateral arrests” of American citizens.[21] In one documented case, three children who are U.S. citizens were deported to Honduras with their mother, one of them a four-year-old with late-stage cancer who left without medication, according to the families’ attorneys.[22]
Who Profits
The detention industry
Most of ICE’s detention network is operated by two publicly traded companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. In February 2025, CoreCivic’s CEO told investors he expected the administration’s immigration policies to produce “the most significant growth in our company’s history,” and GEO Group’s executive chairman described “an unprecedented opportunity at this time to play a role in supporting President Trump’s new administration policy.”[27]
They were right. GEO Group now holds more than $2 billion in ICE contracts, roughly half its revenue, and its 2025 profits rose nearly 700 percent, to more than $250 million. CoreCivic’s net income rose nearly 70 percent, to $116.5 million, with more than $650 million in ICE contract obligations. In August 2026 the two companies announced roughly $1.4 billion in combined quarterly revenue as detention climbed.[27][28]
The money also flows toward the administration. GEO Group was the first corporate PAC to max out to the 2024 Trump campaign; GEO-linked giving to the campaign, associated entities, and the inauguration totaled nearly $2 million, and a GEO subsidiary gave $1 million to Trump’s super PAC in 2026. CoreCivic and its CEO donated $816,600 to the campaign and inaugural committee.[27]
The president’s own portfolio
This is the part most coverage of detention never reaches, and it comes from Trump’s own financial disclosures.
An analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog, found that Trump’s brokers have made 29 trades in GEO Group and CoreCivic stock since he returned to office. The first purchases came on the tenth day of his term. The account traded these stocks every month of 2025 except August and December, between $281,029 and $990,000 in total. In February 2025, the same month both companies’ executives predicted historic growth from his policies, his account made seven separate purchases of their stock.[27]
The pattern extends to other ICE contractors. In February 2026, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Axon, the Taser maker; two weeks later, ICE posted a five-year contract solicitation worth about $220 million whose specifications, three procurement experts told CNBC, appeared written so that only Axon could win it. Axon’s stock rose more than 30 percent in the week after the notice.[29] His first-quarter disclosure also showed at least $260,000 in Palantir purchases; in February the administration signed a purchasing agreement worth more than $1 billion giving DHS components, including ICE, access to Palantir’s platforms without competitive bidding.[30]
What the law says, and doesn’t
For almost any other federal official, this would be legally dangerous territory: a criminal statute bars executive-branch employees from participating in matters in which they hold a financial interest. The president is exempt from it. CNBC, reporting the Axon timing, was explicit that no law was broken and that there is no evidence Trump knew of the procurement, that contracting officials knew of his purchase, or that Axon knew he was a shareholder.[29]
The White House says there are no conflicts because the accounts are managed by outside brokers replicating stock indexes, and the Trump Organization says he has no control over the trades. Those defenses deserve to be weighed rather than waved away. What they do not resolve is the structure: unlike recent past presidents, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust, so he holds and trades, in his own name, the stock of companies whose revenue his detention policy drives.[27] And because his disclosures report monthly totals in broad ranges, the public cannot match any trade to any decision, in either direction. The system that would prove innocence or guilt does not produce the data.
The revolving door
The personnel connections run the same direction as the money. The acting director of ICE, David Venturella, is a former GEO Group executive who worked as a paid GEO consultant until January 2025. Border czar Tom Homan was also a paid GEO consultant before joining the government, and Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for GEO Group before her appointment.[27]
One decision makes the stakes concrete. In June 2026, Venturella signed the memo ending ICE’s obligation to publicly report the deaths of detainees who die within 30 days of release, a rule created in 2021 to stop the agency from avoiding responsibility for deaths that occur just after custody ends. GEO Group operates about 25,000 of the beds in the system whose death reporting just narrowed, and the fiscal year in which the industry recorded its most profitable year ever was also the deadliest on record for people in ICE custody.[27][31]
To be precise about what this section does and does not establish: there is no evidence that detention policy was set in order to benefit anyone’s stockholdings, and the dollar amounts in the president’s prison trades are small next to his portfolio. What the documents establish is narrower, and public: the person who sets detention policy holds and trades the stock of its two largest beneficiaries, lawfully, inside a disclosure system too coarse to audit.
Common Claims and What the Evidence Shows
”The border is more secure than it has been in decades, so this is working.”
This is accurate, and it is the strongest argument in the administration’s favor.
Border crossings have fallen sharply. CBP recorded 30,561 total nationwide encounters in October 2025, the lowest start to a fiscal year the agency has recorded, 29 percent below the previous record low set in October 2012.[23] By mid-2026 Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border were running roughly 94 percent below the monthly average under the previous administration, and DHS has reported more than a year of consecutive months with zero releases at the border.[24]
Anyone assessing this record honestly has to hold both findings at once. Border enforcement and interior enforcement are different operations measured by different data. The border numbers are a real achievement by the administration’s own stated goals. They do not tell you who ICE is arresting in Denver or Newark, and they are not evidence about it either way.
”Anyone here illegally broke the law, so criminal record is beside the point.”
This is a coherent position, and it is a legitimate one. If the objection is to unlawful presence itself, then whether a person has a separate criminal record does not matter, and enforcement against people with clean records is enforcement working as intended.
Two things follow from taking it seriously. First, it is a different argument from the one the administration has been making publicly. “Worst of the worst” is a claim about prioritizing dangerous people, and it invites exactly the comparison this article makes. An argument that criminal record is irrelevant abandons that framing rather than defending it.
Second, the public appears to distinguish. In the Marquette survey, support for deporting immigrants in the country illegally stood at 56 percent, but when respondents were asked specifically about people who “have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record,” support fell to 44 percent, with 56 percent opposed.[1] The same poll found that among people who favor deportations generally, 35 percent still disapprove of how ICE is conducting them.[1]
“The criminal-record statistics are misleading because many have prior charges.”
There is something to this, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. ICE’s own “criminal history” classification is broad, sweeping in immigration offenses, minor traffic violations, and arrests that never led to a conviction.[6] A wide definition inflates the criminal column rather than the non-criminal one, which means the no-record figures cited here are, if anything, conservative.
The Cato analysis approached it from the conviction side and found 73 percent of detainees with no criminal convictions and 5 percent with violent convictions.[10]
“ICE officers face real danger and need the tools and discretion to do the job.”
The job carries genuine risk, and that is not in dispute. The question is whether the specific changes made since 2025 improve safety or work against it.
Shorter training is difficult to defend on safety grounds. Cutting firearms instruction from 56 hours to 28 while deploying more than 900 officers who completed the abbreviated program does not obviously protect either officers or the public.[13] Border czar Tom Homan has argued that body cameras “exonerate agents more than they provide evidence of wrongdoing.”[16] If that is right, it is an argument for releasing footage rather than for a policy that releases it only when doing so serves the agency’s interests.
”Public opinion supports this.”
Partly. Majorities support deportation as a goal, at 56 percent in the Marquette poll and 61 percent in Reuters/Ipsos.[1][2] Majorities do not support the current execution: 60 percent said they disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, against 40 percent who approve.[1] Both findings are from the same survey and the same respondents.
The partisan split is wide. Eighty percent of Republicans approve of ICE’s work, compared with 23 percent of independents and 5 percent of Democrats.[1]
Where Things Stand Now
Arrests are at record levels for the term, with July at 49,138 and a daily target of 2,000 coming from the White House.[4] The majority of people arrested in July had no criminal record.[4]
Detention is at roughly 70,000 people, the highest in the agency’s history, with deaths in custody at their highest rate in more than a decade and inspections down.[3][17][19] The statutory ombudsman office that reviewed detention complaints is not operating.[15]
In August 2026 ICE awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract for 6,000 pairs of gloves that deliver electric shocks. The agency’s own procurement notice says the device is for use when a subject is “actively or passively resisting,” and lists civil disturbances outside detention facilities among the scenarios. The manufacturer’s guidance says the gloves should not be used as punishment and warns against use on children, the elderly, pregnant women, or people with disabilities. DHS defended the purchase, saying that “sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable.”[25][26]
The border numbers remain at multi-decade lows.[23][24]
Whether that trade is worth making is a judgment, and it is yours to make. What the record will not support is the belief that the people being arrested are mostly people with criminal records. On that narrower question, the government’s own data is clear.
Sources
2. The Hill: Majorities back Trump on deportations, but oppose methods (Reuters/Ipsos survey)
3. NPR: Deaths in ICE custody already surpass last year’s total (March 10, 2026)
6. The Daily Beast: ICE’s Own Numbers on the “Worst of the Worst” Claim (April 2026)
7. Todd Lyons, Acting ICE Director: Written Congressional Testimony (PDF, April 16, 2026)
9. FactCheck.org: As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record
10. Cato Institute: 5% of ICE Detainees Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions
11. MS NOW: They immigrated legally. Under Trump, 1.8 million have been “de-legalized.” (July 30, 2026)
13. The Washington Post: Records show ICE training was slashed to speed deportations (March 3, 2026)
17. Human Rights Watch / Physicians for Human Rights: Deaths in ICE Custody Surge (June 25, 2026)
18. KFF: Deaths and Health Care Issues in ICE Detention Centers Under the Second Trump Administration
19. Project On Government Oversight: ICE Inspections Plummeted as Detentions Soared in 2025
21. CBS News: Transcript, Border czar Tom Homan on “Face the Nation”
22. CNN: 3 children who are US citizens, including one with cancer, deported
23. U.S. Customs and Border Protection: DHS delivers historic start to border crossings for FY 2026
25. The Epoch Times: ICE Awards $16.7 Million No-Bid Contract for 6,000 Pairs of Electric Shock Gloves
27. CREW: Trump has made 29 private prison stock trades since taking office (July 21, 2026)
29. CNBC: Trump bought Axon stock weeks before ICE sought a $220 million Taser contract (June 29, 2026)
30. NOTUS: Trump Bought Corporations’ Stock as His Administration Boosted Their Business (May 2026)
31. CNN: ICE to stop reporting deaths of recently released detainees amid scrutiny (June 5, 2026)
32. The New York Times (via Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette): US plans to expand Haitian removals (August 28, 2026) and UPI: U.S. deports 57 more people to Haiti during gang violence surge (August 28, 2026)