Which counties in the us had the highest average crime rate before the ICE raids started? Does it align with the concentration of the current ice raids?
Executive summary
A simple one-to-one connection between the counties with the highest pre‑raid crime rates and the counties where recent ICE raids concentrate cannot be established from the available reporting: the detailed trac analysis shows ICE arrests are highly concentrated in a small set of counties (more than a quarter in ten counties) immigration/reports/533/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[1], while available crime‑rate reporting highlights different counties—often small, high‑homicide parishes or rural counties—as having the nation’s highest murder rates [2]; none of the supplied sources map those two datasets directly to demonstrate alignment.
1. What the enforcement data actually shows about where ICE is operating
Investigative compilations find ICE arrests are not evenly distributed across the country but are clustered: tracreports documents that over 28% of recent ICE arrests took place in just ten U.S. counties and their surrounding localities, and that roughly half of arrests occurred in a relatively small set of counties and regions—a classic concentration effect rather than a nationwide scattershot pattern [1]. Newsweek’s mapping of state‑level arrest totals for the early 2025 surge also identifies Texas, Florida and California as the states with the largest absolute numbers of arrests in that window [3], and local reporting shows urban counties such as Denver County led ICE activity within particular states [4].
2. What the crime‑rate data supplied in reporting points to
The sources available here do not include a comprehensive, contemporaneous national ranking that cross‑references county‑level crime rates immediately before the recent raids; however, historical lists of counties with the highest murder rates emphasize different geographies—small, often low‑income counties and parishes such as Orleans Parish (New Orleans), Coahoma County, Dallas County, Ala., and Phillips County, Ark., have appeared among top murder‑rate lists in prior reporting [2]. Wider datasets exist (for example, a county‑level crime dataset hosted on Kaggle) but the trac, DHS and state reporting provided do not extract a national pre‑raid county ranking to match against the ICE arrest concentrations [5].
3. Do high‑crime counties overlap with where ICE is focused?
The evidence in these sources points to weak alignment: ICE arrests concentrate in a handful of counties and metropolitan areas [1] [3] [4], while the counties often cited for exceptionally high homicide or murder rates in other reporting tend to be different places—frequently smaller or rural counties and parishes—not the major urban counties showing the largest numbers of ICE arrests in 2025 [2] [4]. Where federal authorities and DHS assert returns in public‑safety metrics after enforcement operations, those claims are supported by selective interpretations of crime trends in some cities and highlighted reports (DHS cites a Council on Criminal Justice finding of declines in certain violent crimes) rather than by a county‑level crosswalk of “highest crime” to “most raids” [6].
4. Competing narratives and data caveats
The Department of Homeland Security publicly linked enforcement to falling violent crime in certain cities by citing an independent report [6], a claim that can imply causation but is not corroborated here with county‑level matching; advocacy and research groups caution that ICE arrest counts and detention populations are driven by policy priorities and local cooperation, not necessarily by objective community crime rankings [7] [8]. Independent analyses also stress that many people arrested by ICE have no convictions or only immigration‑related violations—Cato and other trackers reported a large share of detainees with no violent convictions—complicating simple narratives tying raids to removal of “the worst of the worst” [9] [8]. The UCLA state‑variation work and prison‑policy reporting further underscore that political directives and operational priorities can shift where and whom ICE targets, independent of measured local crime rates [10] [7].
5. Bottom line and limits of the public record
Based on the supplied reporting, ICE arrests are highly geographically concentrated in a small number of counties and states [1] [3], while reported lists of counties with the highest murder or violent‑crime rates tend to highlight a different set of places [2]; the materials provided do not include a direct, validated county‑by‑county comparison of pre‑raid crime rates against ICE arrest concentrations, so a definitive statement of alignment cannot be made from these sources alone [5]. Where DHS interprets crime declines as a result of removals, that is a policy claim relying on selective reporting and merits independent statistical cross‑checking that is not present in the documents supplied [6].