But government data around ongoing detentions tells a different story.
“There’s a deep disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-faculty director of the UCLA Law School’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “This administration, and also in the prior Trump administration, they consistently claim to be going after the worst of the worst and just talk about immigration enforcement as though it is all about going after violent, dangerous people with extensive criminal histories. And yet overwhelmingly, it’s people they’re targeting for arrest who have no criminal history of any kind.”
Each detainee is assigned a threat level by ICE on a scale of 1 to 3, with one being the highest. Those without a criminal record are classified as having “no ICE threat level.” As of June 23, the latest data available, 84% of people detained at 201 facilities nationwide were not given a threat level. Another 7% had been graded as a level 1 threat, 4% were level 2 and 5% were level 3.
“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, called the assessment that ICE isn’t targeting immigrants with a criminal record “false” and said that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has directed ICE “to target the worst of the worst—including gang members, murderers, and rapists.” She counted detainees with convictions, as well as those with pending charges, as “criminal illegal aliens.”
The Cato Institute found that between Feb. 8 and May 17, the daily average of “noncriminals” processed into the system ranged from 421 to 454. In the following two weeks at the end of May, that number rose to 678 and then rose to 927 in the period from June 1 through 14.
“What you’re seeing is this huge increase in funding to detain people, remove people, enforce immigration laws,” Eisen said. “And what we’re seeing is that a lot of these people back to sort of the original question you asked, these are not people who are dangerous.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said the administration is intensely focused on rooting out unvetted criminals who are in the country illegally.
“Just this week, the Administration conducted a successful operation rescuing children from labor exploitation at a marijuana facility in California, and continued arresting the worst of the worst – including murderers, pedophiles, gang members, and rapists,” she wrote in an email. “Any suggestion that the Administration is not laser focused on these dangerous criminals is flat out wrong.”
Experts say the false rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration creates real harm.
“It makes people in immigrant communities feel targeted and marginalized,” Arulanantham said. “It creates more political and social space for hate in all its forms, including hate crime against immigrant communities.”
Eisen noted that the impact extends to other communities as well.
“All Americans should want safe and thriving communities and this idea that the president of the United States is making misleading statements about the truth and distorting reality is not the way to deliver public safety,” she said.
