Trump Vowed His Mass Deportation Efforts Would Target 'the Worst of the Worst.' Here's What the Data Shows

President Donald Trump and Administration officials have repeatedly insisted his hard-line immigration agenda is focused on rooting out and expelling dangerous criminals, painting their efforts to carry out mass deportations as a means of protecting law-abiding Americans. Since launching his reelection campaign, Trump has vowed to deport “the worst of the worst” while blaming migrants for bringing “crime, drugs, misery and death” to the U.S.  As recently as last week, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security reiterated that the immigration crackdown is primarily aimed at criminal offenders—and claimed it is succeeding in detaining and removing them. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Yet a number of studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than Americans born in the U.S., and that undocumented immigration does not increase violent offenses. And recent federal data show that over 70% of detainees who were being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as of Thursday had no criminal convictions. As of Sept. 25, according to the data, 59,762 people were in ICE detention. Among them, 17,007 had been convicted of a crime and another 15,009 faced pending criminal charges, while the largest group—comprising 27,746 detainees—had neither a conviction nor pending criminal charges against them. The share of people without criminal records in detention appears to have grown significantly since Trump’s return to the White House in January. The Cato Institute reported in June, citing nonpublic data from the agency, that at the time 65% of the people who had been processed by ICE since fiscal year 2025 started at the beginning of October 2024 had not been convicted of crimes, while 53% of those who had were convicted of nonviolent offenses compared to 6.9% who were convicted of violent crimes. The data seems to contradict the Administration’s narrative that it has prioritized the “worst” criminals as it has deported tens of thousands of people and detained many others. By the end of last month, the number of deportations it had carried out was nearing 200,000. The Department of Homeland Security announced last week that “2 million illegal aliens have been removed or have self-deported” since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, saying the Administration was on pace to “shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000” by year’s end. In addition to increasing the pace of deportations, Trump has targeted several major cities in recent months amid his efforts to crack down on both crime and immigration, deploying troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Portland while threatening to do the same in a number of others. He has also ramped up immigration enforcement operations in Massachusetts and Chicago, and sought to fight the sanctuary city policies some have in place that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. While Trump has repeatedly pointed to violent crime in the cities amid the deployments and threatened further deployments, data shows crime rates already declining in cities including D.C. and Portland after they previously rose during the COVID-19 pandemic.