Solely 3% of people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement throughout the first 14 months of the second Trump administration had a violent felony conviction, in response to an ABC Information evaluation of presidency knowledge.
The findings, based mostly on knowledge monitoring the present Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, come after President Donald Trump had pledged to focus on the “worst of the worst” legal offenders among the many nation’s migrants.
Primarily based on authorities knowledge analyzed by ABC Information as offered by ICE in response to a FOIA requests to the Deportation Knowledge Mission and the College of Washington Heart for Human Rights, the findings present that immigration enforcement has affected greater than 400,000 people with no violent legal historical past, together with dad and mom and spouses of U.S. residents.
Whereas the three% determine is in line with charges seen beneath the Biden administration, the information exhibits the Trump administration just isn’t detaining a larger proportion of violent offenders regardless of a big general enhance in whole detentions.
‘President Trump’s promise’
Beneath Trump, there was document excessive detention inhabitants, at present at round 60,000 in federal immigration custody. Probably the most detainees beneath the earlier administration was 39,748 in November 2023, in response to a nonprofit knowledge gathering group.
In response to the federal government knowledge, of the 438,537 individuals detained between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, 13,018 had a violent felony conviction in america. The evaluation outlined “violent felony” as murder, sexual assault, theft, or assault.
The information additionally confirmed that within the first eight months of 2025, ICE apprehended the dad and mom of roughly 14,450 U.S.-born kids. This eight-month determine almost surpassed the full for all of 2024 and surpassed the yearly totals for each 2022 and 2023.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers escort a detained immigrant into an elevator after he exited an immigration courtroom, June 17, 2025, in New York.
Olga Fedorova/AP
Of these apprehended throughout the administration’s first seven months, greater than 9,700 kids noticed at the very least one dad or mum positioned into immigration detention — greater than in earlier years. Of these detained, dad and mom of greater than 7,000 kids had been finally deported. Of the greater than 4,700 deported dad and mom, 265 had a violent felony conviction. And of the greater than 6,400 detained dad and mom, 322 had a violent felony conviction.
In a press release to ABC Information, a spokesperson for the Division of Homeland Safety mentioned, “Since Day One, DHS regulation enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American individuals to arrest and deport legal unlawful aliens together with murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. This knowledge is being cherry picked by the Deportation Knowledge Mission to hawk a false narrative.”
The Deportation Knowledge Mission supplies minimally processed and unprocessed knowledge provided to them straight by ICE through FOIA.
“Practically 70% of ICE arrests are legal unlawful aliens,” the assertion went on to say. “We’re persevering with to go after the worst of the worst — together with gang members, pedophiles, and rapists. Most of the people which can be counted as ‘non-criminals’ are literally terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and extra; they only haven’t got a rap sheet within the U.S.”
“Additional, each single one in every of these people dedicated against the law after they got here into this nation illegally,” the assertion mentioned concerning prices of illegal entry, which is mostly a civil violation, not a legal offense.
‘Financial penalties’
Andrea Flores, the founding father of Securing America’s Promise and a former Division of Homeland Safety official, mentioned the coverage of mass deportation may result in a toddler welfare disaster.
“So many kids are dropping major caretakers or going to guardians,” Flores mentioned in a Zoom interview. “We’re going to have a category of kids who lose their dad and mom beneath this administration that’s larger than we most likely have seen in trendy historical past.”
DHS mentioned in a press release that ICE doesn’t separate households and that “dad and mom are requested in the event that they need to be eliminated with their kids or ICE will place the kids with a secure particular person the dad or mum designates.”
Within the first eight months of 2025, ICE additionally apprehended 4,843 spouses of U.S. residents. In the course of the first seven months of the time period, greater than 2,000 of those spouses had been deported. Of the greater than 2,000 spouses of U.S. residents deported throughout the first seven months of the time period, 165 had a violent felony conviction.
“We can not underplay what it means to have even only a partner go to detention, as a result of what if they’re the first earner in that family?” Flores mentioned. “We’re speaking about financial penalties. We’re speaking in regards to the emotional prices of not getting access to that member of the family.”
Trump administration officers have mentioned that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily focusing on harmful and violent criminals dwelling within the U.S. illegally, however they’ve additionally maintained that anybody residing within the nation with out authorized standing is topic to elimination.
Methodology
ABC Information analyzed enforcement traits by merging two major sources: knowledge offered by ICE through FOIA requests to the Deportation Knowledge Mission and ICE knowledge offered to the College of Washington Heart for Human Rights. The information offered to the Deportation Knowledge Mission consists of knowledge from the Division of Homeland Safety’s PERSIST database, which exhibits the complete lifecycle of immigration circumstances from January 2022 via early March 2026.
The information offered to the College of Washington Heart for Human Rights consists of I-213 information, that are the paperwork created when immigration officers arrest a noncitizen. These information span from January 2022 via late August 2025.
Publicly obtainable knowledge from ICE and DHS present detention populations and numbers on removals.
Statistics concerning the full variety of dad and mom and spouses apprehended had been calculated utilizing the College of Washington dataset alone. To find out what number of of these people had been particularly detained or deported, ABC Information matched information throughout each databases utilizing distinctive identifiers such because the date of arrest, gender, nation of citizenship, and delivery yr.
The evaluation centered on a subset of the information the place a definitive match may very well be made between the 2 sources. The merged dataset allowed ABC Information to trace the development of particular person circumstances from the preliminary arrest via federal custody to establish dad and mom and spouses who had been in the end held in services or faraway from the nation.
ABC Information’ estimates for the variety of U.S. residents who had a dad or mum or partner arrested, detained and deported are seemingly an undercount. ProPublica, a nonprofit information group, first reported similar data in March.
ABC Information’ evaluation of U.S. residents who had a dad or mum or partner detained is proscribed to solely people for whom arresting brokers wrote an I-213 report, which represents the overwhelming majority of people arrested by ICE, however just isn’t everybody who has been detained. To carry out the evaluation, any potential duplicates within the knowledge weren’t counted.
Flores mentioned these numbers will seemingly develop.
“We’ve got seen some latest reporting as properly that the numbers are going into the tens of 1000’s by way of kids who’ve been impacted by a detained dad or mum,” Flores mentioned. “There are 4 million U.S. citizen kids in present estimates who’ve a dad or mum that is not documented.”
ABC Information’ Ryann Jones and Armando Garcia contributed to this report.
