Only 3% of people detained by United States Immigration And Customs Enforcement during the first 14 months of the second Trump administration had a violent felony conviction, according to an analysis of government data that undercuts the White House's claim that it is focused on the 'worst of the worst.' The data covers 438,537 detainees from Jan. 20, 2025, through March 11, 2026, and shows 13,018 people with violent felony convictions in the United States.
The findings matter because they measure the scale of the immigration crackdown in hard numbers. More than 400,000 people detained by ICE in that span had no violent criminal history, even as the administration's detention population rose to around 60,000 in federal immigration custody, far above the previous high of 39,748 in November 2023.
The analysis was based on government data provided by ICE in response to Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Deportation Data Project and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. It defined violent felony as homicide, sexual assault, robbery or assault, and it found that the Trump administration was not detaining a higher share of violent offenders despite the sharp increase in total detentions.
That leaves the central dispute intact. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the data was being cherry picked to 'peddle a false narrative,' said nearly 70% of ICE arrests are criminal illegal aliens and added that many people counted as non-criminals are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and others who simply do not have a U.S. rap sheet. The department also said every one of those people committed a crime when they entered the country illegally, a point that does not answer how many had violent felony convictions in the records reviewed.
The same data also puts families at the center of the enforcement surge. In the first eight months of 2025, ICE apprehended the parents of approximately 14,450 U.S.-born children. During the first seven months of the administration, more than 9,700 children saw at least one parent placed into immigration detention, and by the time of the report parents of more than 7,000 children had been deported. Of more than 4,700 deported parents, 265 had a violent felony conviction, while 322 of more than 6,400 detained parents did.
Trump campaigned on targeting the 'worst of the worst,' but the data reviewed here shows that the enforcement machinery has overwhelmingly swept in people without violent felony records. The unanswered question is how many of the rest had other criminal histories, whether outside the United States or in categories not captured by the data now driving the argument.
