Do the main raids conducted by ICE aligne with the cities/ areas with most violent and organized crime before the raids started?
Executive summary
ICE asserts its highest-profile removals focus on fugitives and serious criminal actors — including homicide, gang-related offenses and terrorism — and often relies on Interpol and task forces to locate them [1]. Independent datasets and watchdog reporting, however, show ICE arrests concentrate in a handful of counties and frequently include people without U.S. violent convictions, raising significant questions about whether raids consistently align with areas that already had the highest levels of violent or organized crime before operations began [2] [3] [4].
1. What ICE says about targets and methods
ICE’s public framing is that Enforcement and Removal Operations prioritize serious criminals and fugitives — from gang members to suspected terrorists — and that task-force cooperation both domestic and international helps identify those targets [1]. DHS has also credited ICE removals with reductions in some violent crime metrics in 2025, framing arrests as public-safety interventions [5]. Those official claims serve an explicit policy and political purpose: justify broad enforcement and link removals to community safety outcomes [5].
2. Where raids are actually concentrated
Multiple independent trackers and analyses show ICE interior arrests are geographically concentrated: a large share of arrests occur in a small number of counties and metro areas — for example, TRAC found over half of interior arrests occur in limited locales and another analysis noted raids clustered in places like Los Angeles, D.C., Portland and Chicagoland during policy surges [2] [6] [7]. Community groups documented sharp upticks in activity in New York City in early 2020 as well, reporting hundreds of raids in weeks where activity spiked [8]. These concentrations reflect operational choices — proximity to detention infrastructure, local jail partnerships, and political directives — not necessarily baseline local crime rates [2] [6].
3. The mismatch between criminal profiles and violent-crime hotspots
Data analyses and reporting show that a substantial share of people arrested by ICE have no U.S. criminal convictions, and among those with convictions only a small fraction are for violent or property crimes — figures highlighted by independent reviewers and researchers [3] [9]. That pattern undercuts a straightforward equation that ICE raids simply follow where violent or organized crime is worst: many raids detain migrants for civil immigration violations or nonviolent offenses rather than removing the “worst of the worst” in a city with high violent-crime statistics [3] [4].
4. Evidence for alignment — and why it’s incomplete
There are documented cases and statements where ICE says operations targeted gang members and serious offenders and where some local crime metrics dropped after removals — claims advanced by DHS and tied to independent crime reports [5] [1]. Yet publicly available DHS and ICE datasets lack the granularity to directly tie each raid to pre-existing local violent- or organized-crime prevalence, and independent analyses show large shares of arrests happen in a few counties regardless of measured violent-crime levels [1] [2] [4]. This produces an evidentiary gap: plausible targeted removals exist, but systemic alignment with the areas “with most violent and organized crime” across the country is not clearly supported by the data available.
5. Motives, politics and reporting incentives
Operational spikes map to policy directives and political pressure as much as to crime maps: previous escalations coincided with White House demands for more arrests, after which ICE focused raids in high-visibility metros [6]. Advocacy groups and local reporting emphasize community harm and nonviolent targets [8] [10], while DHS emphasizes public-safety benefits and selective success stories [5]. Each source carries an agenda — enforcement agencies to legitimize policy, advocates to protect communities — so reconciling claims requires caution [6] [8] [5].
6. Bottom line: partial alignment, but not a clear nationwide pattern
The nuanced answer is that ICE conducts high-profile operations aimed at serious offenders and concentrates arrests in particular counties and metro areas [1] [2], yet the broader arrest profile and the geographic concentration do not demonstrate a consistent, nationwide alignment with areas that had the highest preexisting levels of violent or organized crime; many arrested people lack violent U.S. convictions and operational choices often reflect political directives, jail access and logistical factors as much as crime mapping [3] [4] [6]. Public data limitations mean definitive proof either way is lacking — the record shows some targeted removals but not a clear, systematic pattern tying most raids to the places with the worst violent or organized crime prior to the raids [1] [2] [3].