Trump will say it’s fake news but since the data (ICE arrest records) is from DHS even a chunk of Republicans will continue to question whether what ICE has been doing is worth the likely political cost. From the beginning of his second term Trump has led his draconian deportation policy with the theme of going after “The Worst of the Worst.” According to DHS own (secret) data fewer than one in seven detained/deported by ICE have charges and/or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
Look, no one thinks it’s a bad idea to deport violent criminals, major drug or human traffickers and so on. However it’s long been noted that’s NOT who ICE has been rounding up to meet Trump Whisperer Stephen Miller’s mandated quotas. It’s also not difficult to comb through records of who’s in jail or prison due to crimes that any of us would say qualify for ‘worst of the worst’ offenders and make arrangements to go in and take them into ICE custody. Interestingly deporting some of them to their home county would be a blessing for them but that’s a whole separate topic.
What matters is that Miller (and therefore Trump) is furious that three thousand immigrants a day aren’t being rounded up and deported. To get to even the thousand plus a day that’s been happening ICE has cast a wide net. Are they working with local/state LE to get intel on gang ridden communities and sweeping through THOSE places looking for actual, dangerous people? Oh hell no. Instead they are sitting in courthouses, immigration offices, around schools and places where day workers hope to find jobs and so on. In reality, as The Daily Beast tells us of roughly 400K migrants ICE has taken into custody their own arrest records blow the ‘worst of the worst’ claim to smithereens!
The numbers tell a very different story than the picture Team Trump has tried to paint. What those records show is 42% of those arrested have NO criminal charges or convictions. Another 40% have only civil charges related to living in the U.S. illegally. About 11K have charges along the lines of interfering with ICE investigations. When you drill down it’s even worse than I’ve said:
However, the official statistics from DHS’s own internal document cast doubt on how effectively the sweeping immigration crackdown is targeting violent criminals involved in drugs, organized crime, or murder.
The data shows that just 0.5 percent of the nearly 393,000 ICE arrests involved people accused or convicted of homicide, amounting to around 2,100 individuals. There were similarly low numbers for those accused or convicted of sexual assault (1.4 percent), weapons offenses (1.6 percent), or dangerous drug charges (5.7 percent). Just 2 percent of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.
According to an analysis by CBS News just 13.9 percent of those arrested had been charged with or arrested for violent crimes.
When you look at that the claims we’ve heard since this all started a year ago can be summed up in one word. A word that a certain nasty brown ‘flop’ of bovine excrement on the ground is called. Bullshit! It gets even worse. Month after month this grabbing of ‘low hanging fruit’ instead of actually going after the true worst of the worst went on. People got conditioned (sort of) to it. Over and over we saw pictures and videos of people, including children that clearly were no threat. Instead we see analyses from multiple sources showing ICE, if anything is avoiding going into tough urban neighborhoods or places in rural America where some seriously threatening groups have a presence.
It’s much easier and safer to stick to courthouses, offices (including and especially immigration offices where people are going to regular check in appointments or to continue the process of getting a green card or citizenship), schools, meat packing plants and quiet residential neighborhoods where there are NO signs of houses with gang activity:
Other analyses have similarly suggested that ICE is not rounding up the “worst of the worst” at the scale it claims while defending its deportation push.
In December, the Daily Beast found that multiple immigrants labeled on a DHS website as the “worst criminal aliens arrested” were accused only of minor offenses such as traffic violations or marijuana possession, which is not even a crime in many states.
A review of ICE data by the Cato Institute found that as of October 2025, 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody had no criminal conviction, while nearly half had neither a conviction nor pending charges. Just 5 percent of migrants detained by ICE had a violent conviction, according to the institute.
I especially like that last part. The Cato Institute is a conservative Libertarian place. You won’t find progressives heading up any of their working groups. They distrust big government and if anything feared liberals would do what Trump is doing – creating a private army that answers to him and doesn’t have to worry about rules, norms, the Constitution or consequences for overreach of even crimes while carrying out their duties. At least unlike other conservatives they are sticking to their principles. I’m reminded of a moment from the movie The Contender when Joan Allen’s character explains to the President “Principles only matter if you stick with them when they’re convenient.”
Anyway we are in uncharted territory. Trump wanted to stoke public outrage, and provoke the public somewhere into doing something that would justify invoking The Insurrection Act. Portland. Los Angeles. He surely tried, and failed. So a scheme was hatched to send a literally army into Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul. Each has roughly 600 sworn police officers. Team Trump surged in over THREE THOUSAND federal agents with ICE leading the way to terrorize the place. Why Minneapolis? Well, the Gov. of Minnesota was on the ticket than almost denied him a second term. Then there’s there’s the good sized Somali contingent who made the place home after escaping the hell they endured in their ancestral homeland. They assimilated and are well regarded. One of them however became not just a U.S. Citizen but got elected to Congress and has been a thorn in Trump’s side.
That all was more than enough reason to, as I wrote a while back for Trump to do a modern day Brigham Young and say “This is the place.” The supposed justification was fraud in government aid programs but Gov. Walz already had his people rooting it out and working with the feds to prosecute it. So the stated reason was a lie. And predictably, surging so many federal agents dressed up and stoked up to believe they were Soldiers and Marines in Iraq in hostile cities people have been shot. And killed.
Remember Iraq and the tag line ‘Bush Lied – People Died?’ Well, we can now say Trump Lied and People Died!’ He lied at the start saying the focus would be on getting rid of the ‘worst of the worst.’ He’s continued that lie as a mountain of evidence has piled up his cospalying-in-their-tactical-gear storm troopers have terrorized regular folks just going about their jobs and daily lives (albeit sometimes having entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa), often for years and even decades with little or no legal trouble. Oh, and for good measure grabbing their kids too! He lied about the reason for deploying THOUSANDS of his Storm Troopers to the Twin-Cities, to a state estimated to have had perhaps 70-80k living here without proper documentation. (FYI Texas has over 2 MILLION!) And, when things got to the point where regular, law abiding citizens were shot and killed lying about the victims!
Maybe it’s time we revive and update the old protest indictment of Bush 43. Maybe it’s time to make TRUMP HAS LIED – PEOPLE HAVE DIED! part of the national dialogue.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
