Keep Factually independent
Whether you agree or disagree with our analysis, these conversations matter for democracy. We don't take money from political groups - even a $5 donation helps us keep it that way.
What percentage of ICE arrests are women compared to men historically?
Executive summary
Available reporting and government releases document ICE arrest and detention totals but provide only limited direct breakdowns by sex; the official ICE statistics pages and recent reporting focus on counts, criminality, and facility populations rather than a long historical male‑vs‑female percentage series (not found in current reporting) [1] [2]. Contemporary coverage in 2024–2025 shows ICE detentions in the tens of thousands and extensive reporting on criminal‑history shares, but the sources provided do not state a clear historical percentage split of arrests that are women versus men (not found in current reporting) [3] [4].
1. What ICE’s public statistics emphasize — and what they don’t
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) publishes regular tables and detention statistics (detention counts, removals, arrests by arresting agency), and media organizations like The Guardian use those biweekly releases to track arrests and detention totals; these releases and contemporary reporting focus heavily on total arrests/detainees and criminal‑history categories, not on a long‑run sex breakdown of arrests over many years [1] [2].
2. Recent journalism and analyses on demographics highlight gaps
Investigations by outlets such as The Marshall Project and Journalist’s Resource note that granular person‑level records are sometimes obtainable by FOIA and investigative work, and that ICE’s public spreadsheets can be incomplete or delayed — which complicates compiling a consistent historical trend by sex without targeted data requests and aggregation [5] [6]. Those accounts imply researchers must stitch together multiple releases and FOIA returns to compute reliable sex‑based trends [5] [6].
3. What the available sources do report clearly
The reporting and ICE materials in the provided set give clear figures for overall detainee counts (tens of thousands in 2025) and the share of detainees with and without criminal convictions — for example, several sources report that roughly 71–73% of people in ICE detention in 2025 had no criminal conviction, a statistic emphasized across Migration Policy, Trace/Tracreports, and The Guardian coverage [3] [7] [4]. Those figures show what ICE and journalists prioritize: criminality classification and facility populations rather than sex breakdowns [3] [7].
4. Why a simple “percent women vs. men” is hard to produce from these sources
None of the supplied sources include a clear historical series that lists percent female versus percent male among ICE arrests going back multiple years; the ICE annual report and the ERO web pages provide many statistics but the excerpts here do not show a sex breakdown across fiscal years, so asserting a specific historical percentage would exceed what these documents explicitly report (not found in current reporting) [8] [1].
5. How researchers typically build that answer (and why it matters)
Academic and journalistic efforts that do produce sex breakdowns generally aggregate ICE monthly/biweekly spreadsheets, FOIA returns, or individual booking records to compute shares by sex and year. The Journalist’s Resource piece and Marshall Project reporting recommend such aggregation because ICE’s public cadence and occasional omissions can produce misleading short‑term snapshots; this approach is necessary to separate trends driven by policy changes from short surges tied to particular operations [6] [5].
6. What the recent policy context implies for sex composition
Multiple sources describe a marked operational shift in 2025 toward interior enforcement and large raids, with leaders saying ICE is sweeping more broadly rather than prioritizing high‑criminality cases [9]. That change could alter the demographic composition of arrests (e.g., more workplace or community arrests could bring a different gender mix), but the provided reporting does not quantify how those operational shifts changed the male/female ratio — the implication is plausible but not documented in the cited material [9] [2].
7. Practical next steps to get a defensible percentage
To answer your original question with authoritative numbers, one should: (a) download ICE’s ERO Initial Book‑Ins by Arresting Agency and Month tables (biweekly releases archived by The Guardian and ICE) and (b) aggregate person‑level or monthly totals where sex is recorded (via ICE spreadsheets or FOIA datasets referenced by The Guardian and Journalist’s Resource). The sources here point to those data sources but do not themselves include a ready historical sex breakdown [2] [6].
8. Caveats and transparency about limits
Be mindful that ICE’s public counts sometimes omit datasets or change formats; the Marshall Project warns that gaps and shutdowns can hide enforcement intensity, meaning any computed sex percentages could change if later releases correct earlier omissions [5]. Also, different reporting (ICE vs. advocacy or media) may classify population subsets differently, so comparing sources without harmonizing definitions risks error [1] [4].
If you want, I can: (A) attempt to compute the female vs. male percentages for a specified recent year using ICE biweekly tables archived by The Guardian and ICE (if you want year[10] and I’ll aggregate), or (B) draft FOIA/record‑request language to obtain person‑level booking data that includes sex. Which would you prefer?