What is the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) and how did ICE’s 2025 reporting changes affect visibility into jail-origin arrests?
Executive summary
The Criminal Alien Program (CAP) is ICE’s enforcement stream that locates, arrests, and processes noncitizens with criminal histories across federal, state, and local facilities and in the community [1]. In mid‑2025 ICE altered how it labeled arrest locations—ceasing to flag arrests conducted via the various local, state, and federal “Criminal Alien Programs” and instead lumping them into a generic “Custodial Arrests” category—reducing the public visibility of which arrests originated in jails versus other settings [2].
1. What the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) is and what it claims to do
ICE describes CAP as a component of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) that “supports” identification, arrest, and removal of alien individuals who threaten community safety by focusing on incarcerated and at‑large criminal aliens and by cooperating with state and local law enforcement [1]. Independent analyses and advocacy groups characterize CAP as a program that targets incarcerated noncitizens booked into jails and prisons and can conduct “CAP surges” intended to identify and process priority individuals before release, as well as at‑large initiatives that locate people outside custody [3]. CAP’s stated mission and operational tools therefore encompass both arrests inside lockups and targeted community operations [1] [3].
2. How CAP historically showed up in ICE’s public data
Before the 2025 reporting change, ICE’s datasets distinguished arrest locations and methods so analysts could separate arrests coming out of local jails, state or federal prisons, and community or at‑large arrests, allowing researchers to quantify how many arrests originated in custody settings versus on the street or at workplaces [2]. Scholars and reporters used those distinctions to trace shifts in enforcement tactics across administrations, documenting periods when a large share of arrests were carried out through CAP at jails and when community “located” arrests increased [4] [5].
3. What changed in 2025 and why it matters for visibility
As of the last week of July 2025, ICE stopped reporting arrests that occurred via the various local, state, and federal “Criminal Alien Programs” separately, instead reporting those cases under the catch‑all label “Custodial Arrests,” a consolidation that obscures whether an arrest was executed through CAP components at local jails or elsewhere in the custodial system [2]. Analysts responding to the change combined categories to approximate jail‑origin arrests, but the reclassification means publicly released tables no longer distinguish local‑jail CAP arrests from other custodial apprehensions, making it harder to measure CAP’s footprint and to assess policy impacts on jail transfers and local policing cooperation [2] [3].
4. Immediate effects observed by researchers and the contested narratives
Researchers using pre‑change data found increases in CAP and in noncustodial “located” arrests after January 2025, and noted policy shifts that correlated with bigger book‑ins and changing conviction profiles among arrestees [4]. After ICE’s reporting consolidation, advocates and analysts warned that reduced granularity undermines oversight and state and local accountability; the American Immigration Council urged regular, disaggregated reporting on CAP encounters and removals to prevent misuse like targeting low‑level offenses or racial profiling [3]. Meanwhile DHS and ICE continued to publicly highlight high‑profile CAP arrests of people with serious convictions, framing enforcement as focused on the “worst of the worst,” which presents an alternative view of program priorities even as independent datasets show a growing share of people ICE booked had no criminal conviction in certain periods [6] [7] [8] [9].
5. What cannot be conclusively stated from available reporting
Public reporting since the July 2025 reclassification makes it difficult to state exact counts or proportions of arrests that originated in local jails versus other custodial settings because ICE’s public tables no longer disaggregate CAP‑sourced arrests, and analysts have resorted to combining categories or using leaked datasets to approximate trends [2] [9]. Calls for more detailed, regular disclosure of arrest location and conviction type persist in the reporting, but the official public data as provided by ICE after the change do not permit precise, independent quantification of jail‑origin CAP activity [2] [3].