Keep Factually independent
Whether you agree or disagree with our analysis, these conversations matter for democracy. We don't take money from political groups - even a $5 donation helps us keep it that way.
How does the 2025 deportation data compare to previous years in terms of conviction severity?
Executive Summary
The 2025 deportation data shows a clear shift away from concentrating removals on people with serious convictions toward a larger share of arrests and detentions of individuals with no or minor criminal histories, a pattern that contrasts with prior years and administrations. Multiple datasets and reports indicate rising interior arrests, higher proportions of detainees without convictions, and a complex mix of targeted arrests of some serious offenders alongside broad enforcement that captures many with minor or no convictions [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Arrests are up — but many arrestees lack felony convictions, a striking divergence from past priorities
Across local and national snapshots, 2025 enforcement shows a higher volume of interior arrests and a notable increase in people without criminal convictions. Regional reporting from the tri-county area found triple the ICE arrests year-over-year with about half of arrestees lacking convictions versus 8 percent in the prior Biden-era year, and national figures show a rising share of arrests involving people with no convictions — roughly 28 percent in fiscal 2024 and higher percentages reported into 2025 [1] [3]. Federal reporting and project repositories corroborate that many detainees in 2025 were classified as having no convictions or only pending minor charges, undercutting claims that enforcement is limited to the “worst of the worst” [2] [5]. This pattern signals an administrative shift in enforcement that increases interior operations at the expense of conviction severity thresholds.
2. The administration reports arrests of serious offenders, but numbers fall short of the pool identified by ICE
Officials and trackers list hundreds of arrests of people convicted of severe crimes — including hundreds for murder and sexual assault by mid-2025 — yet those arrest totals represent a small fraction of the tens to hundreds of thousands of noncitizens with criminal convictions that ICE has identified in its records [4]. The data shows that while the government has prioritized high-severity cases, the pace of arrests for those categories is limited relative to the overall identified caseload, leaving the bulk of removals and arrests focused on other groups. This mismatch between the identified population of convicted offenders and the relatively small number arrested suggests enforcement capacity, prioritization changes, or logistical barriers are constraining efforts to exclusively target the most serious convictions [4].
3. Interior enforcement and jail-based arrests have risen, altering the convinction-severity mix
2025 enforcement emphasizes interior operations and collaborations with local jails, but the share of arrests coming from local jails has fallen while ICE’s interior arrests of non-jailed individuals have increased, contributing to a larger share of arrests involving people without convictions. Comparative figures show arrests of people in local jails dropped from 61 percent under Biden to 52 percent under the current administration, while arrests of people without convictions rose from about 42 percent to 59 percent in some reporting [3]. This shift means enforcement increasingly sweeps beyond booked detainees with known felony records and into communities, producing a lower overall conviction severity among those arrested and detained in 2025 [3] [5].
4. Prosecutions and removals tell a mixed story — more immigration charges but fewer criminal convictions driving removals
Federal immigration prosecutions rose in early 2025, with substantial jumps for illegal entry and reentry prosecutions, but the majority of convictions driving removals in recent months were immigration offenses rather than violent crime convictions [6]. Simultaneously, detention lengths and the number of detainees with no convictions increased — 71 percent of ICE detainees had no conviction in a September 2025 snapshot — indicating removals and detention are increasingly tied to immigration status and civil enforcement instead of criminal conviction severity [2]. The procedural emphasis on civil removal and detention mechanisms contrasts with past eras where criminal conviction categories played a larger role in enforcement prioritization [5] [6].
5. What the data omits and why the debate persists — capacity, policy, and political framing
Public datasets show gaps and lags: ICE releases are incomplete on removals, TRAC and third-party repositories warn of migration and reporting timing issues, and several datasets are better at counting arrests than contextualizing conviction severity over time [7] [8] [5]. Political narratives diverge: some officials emphasize arrests of violent offenders to justify aggressive interior enforcement, while journalists and regional analyses highlight the growing share of people without convictions to argue the policy has broadened enforcement beyond prior priorities [1] [3]. The most defensible conclusion from available 2025 data is that enforcement intensity has increased and the conviction-severity profile has shifted downward, producing a mix of serious-offender arrests alongside a larger portion of detentions and removals involving minor or no criminal convictions [1] [4] [6].