Did ice remove rapists and murderers from the city of Memphis
Executive summary
Federal and DHS statements assert ICE has arrested “murderers, rapists, pedophiles and gang members” across the country and have named several cases tied to the Memphis area, including an individual with a sexual-exploitation conviction in Shelby County (DHS) [1] [2]. Local elected officials and immigrant-rights advocates, however, say ICE’s Memphis operations are sweeping up nonviolent working people and not prioritizing the “worst of the worst,” and independent, comprehensive data tying ICE’s full Memphis caseload to convictions for murder or rape is not provided in the available reporting [3] [4] [5].
1. What DHS and ICE are publicly claiming
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have issued multiple public releases in late 2025 and January 2026 asserting that their operations nationwide removed numerous “worst of the worst” criminal illegal aliens — naming murders, rapists, pedophiles and gang members — and highlighting specific arrests and convictions in various jurisdictions [6] [7] [8] [9]. Those releases include case-level details in some instances: for example, DHS reported that ICE New Orleans arrested Alfredo Rodriguez-Ordonez, a Mexican national whose criminal history, DHS said, includes a conviction for sexual exploitation of a minor in Shelby County, Tennessee, and an earlier firearms-possession charge in Memphis [1].
2. What the Memphis-focused reporting actually shows
DHS materials also single out arrests tied to the Memphis area in separate releases; the department announced operations in Memphis that it says included arrests of gang members, pedophiles, rapists, domestic abusers and drug traffickers, and listed named individuals in some of those announcements [10] [2]. Those releases present selected, high-profile convictions to support the claim that ICE has removed violent offenders in and around Memphis, but they do not provide a complete roster or a breakdown of every arrest made in the city during the period covered [10] [7].
3. Local officials and advocates dispute the picture
Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen has publicly urged the administration to remove ICE agents from Memphis, arguing agents have terrorized community members and that ICE is not limiting arrests to the “worst of the worst” such as murderers and rapists, but is instead detaining working residents who are not violent offenders [3] [4] [11]. Local immigrant-rights groups echoed that critique earlier, saying ICE’s Memphis arrests often do not target violent criminals and criticizing tactics and outcomes of task-force operations [5]. Those local perspectives challenge DHS’s framing and suggest a gap between selected DHS case announcements and the broader operational impact on Memphis communities [5].
4. Reconciling the claims: partial confirmation, partial uncertainty
The evidence in the provided reporting confirms that DHS and ICE claim to have arrested individuals with convictions for rape and other serious crimes, and at least one named arrest tied to a Shelby County sexual-exploitation conviction was publicly attributed to ICE New Orleans operations that included Memphis-area activity [1] [2]. At the same time, the available sources do not offer a comprehensive, independently verified list of all ICE arrests in Memphis during the cited operations, nor do they provide aggregate statistics showing what share of Memphis arrests were for murder or rape versus nonviolent infractions — leaving the broader claim (“ICE removed rapists and murderers from the city of Memphis”) only partially corroborated by specific examples rather than fully documented across the whole operation [10] [7].
5. Why the disagreement persists and what is missing
Partisan and institutional incentives shape both narratives: DHS/ICE benefit from emphasizing removals of violent offenders to justify enforcement and resources, while local politicians and advocacy groups have political and community-driven reasons to spotlight wrongful or indiscriminate detentions and to call for ICE’s withdrawal [6] [3] [5]. What is missing from the available reporting is an independent, complete accounting of every individual arrested in Memphis operations with linked criminal-conviction records and final disposition data — without that, claims that ICE broadly “removed rapists and murderers from Memphis” must be read as true in specific, named instances but not fully proven as a wholesale description of all local arrests [1] [10] [5].