Have ice committed felonies?

1. Proven criminal convictions of ICE employees: the known cases

Federal prosecutions have resulted in felony convictions of ICE officers: for example, a deportation agent, Andrew Golobic, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after a jury convicted him of using his position to solicit and coerce sex from vulnerable women under his supervision, a high‑profile criminal conviction documented in reporting on ICE personnel abuses ^[1].

2. Patterns of alleged abuse and lethal force that prompted criminal scrutiny

Reporting has linked ICE operations to incidents of excessive force and at least one fatal shooting that triggered criminal investigations and public protests, and legal experts say agents’ authority to arrest or use force is broad yet subject to legal limits that appear to have been stretched amid recent crackdowns ^[2]. Those legal limits — and lawsuits by states such as Minnesota and Illinois — reflect concerns that some actions fall into legally actionable misconduct even if not every instance has led to criminal charges ^[2].

3. Systemic questions about how arrests are generated and framed

Several watchdog and policy pieces document how ICE relies on local policing, traffic stops, and broad interpretations of federal authority to create arrest opportunities — practices that critics say can transform routine encounters into immigration arrests and create avenues for abuse or unlawful detention ^{[6] [7]}. These same reports show that ICE and DHS sometimes treat people with pending charges as “criminal arrests,” a classification that can obscure whether detainees were ever convicted ^[4].

4. Agency narrative versus detention data: who ICE says it targets and who it holds

ICE publicly emphasizes operations to “find, prosecute and remove convicted felons” and runs high‑visibility stings described as arrests of “the worst of the worst,” citing felony convictions in many press releases ^{[5] [8]}. Yet multiple independent data analyses and reports show a contrasting reality inside detention centers: a large share of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction — roughly 73% in some datasets — and many of the detained who do have records were convicted of nonviolent or minor offenses such as traffic violations ^{[3] [4] [7]}.

5. Accountability gaps, quotas and prosecutorial limits that complicate criminal liability determinations

Advocates and news outlets report that ICE agents operate under arrest and detention expectations that create pressure to detain broadly, including quotas and heavy dependence on local arrests, and that internal oversight has sometimes been criticized as insufficient — factors that can allow criminal misconduct to go unaddressed or take longer to surface as prosecutions ^{[7] [1]}. At the same time, the sources do not provide a comprehensive tally of every criminal charge against ICE employees or a full accounting of internal discipline, so the precise scale of felonious conduct within the agency cannot be determined from these reports alone ^{[1] [2]}.

6. How to read the evidence: individual crimes exist, systemic culpability is harder to prove

The documented conviction of at least one ICE agent for felony sexual abuse and reporting of other arrests and alleged excesses prove that ICE personnel have committed felonies in specific cases ^{[1] [2]}. Whether those instances reflect a pattern of criminality across the entire agency is a separate question that the supplied sources cannot fully answer: they do, however, show systemic incentives and operational practices that make misconduct and legally dubious arrests more likely, and they show a discrepancy between the agency’s stated target population and the criminal histories of many detainees ^{[4] [3] [5]}.