Despite administration rhetoric, ICE heavily targets non-criminals
Before Trump took office, about 1 in 16 ICE detainees had no criminal charges or convictions. Now 1 in 4 don’t.
It should not be a stunning revelation to you when I say that President Donald Trump and senior officials within his administration willfully and repeatedly misrepresent the reality of immigration to the United States. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign began with a declaration that criminal immigrants were being sent to the U.S. — a claim that established both Trump’s disregard for the truth and his disregard for being called out for his falsehoods.
The pattern continues. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserts (as he did on Tuesday) that “21 million illegals have crossed our border under the previous administration,” for example, or when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem claims (as she did on Monday) that Los Angeles is “not a city of immigrants [but] a city of criminals,” these are not statements that serious people should take seriously. They are instead rhetoric, meant to escalate Americans’ fears about immigrants and the effects of immigration. (There is no reason to think there are more than 15 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in total, much less having arrived since 2021.)
This rhetoric is necessary because the blurry line Trump sketched during the campaign has come into sharper relief.
While seeking the votes needed to return to the White House, Trump often conflated claims about tens of millions of undocumented immigrants with claims about the dangers posed by criminal immigrants. Asked about Trump’s deportation plans during the vice-presidential debate, then-Sen. JD Vance suggested that criminal immigrants, about a million of them by his estimate, would be the first to be removed. He sort of waved his hand about the rest of the “20, 25 million” undocumented immigrants.