What data break down ICE arrests in Florida in 2025–2026 by conviction status and alleged offense?
Executive summary
ICE and Florida state releases for 2025–early 2026 present two overlapping but not identical pictures: large, publicized sweeps that ICE and the Florida governor characterize as focused on "criminal illegal aliens" — including sexual predators, murderers and gang members — and independent reporting and dataset summaries that show a substantial share of arrests involve people without violent felony convictions or with only immigration/traffic offenses; however, publicly available sources do not provide a single, comprehensive table breaking down every Florida ICE arrest in 2025–2026 by conviction status and alleged offense [1] [2] [3].
1. What official Florida/ICE announcements report: large operations with many convicted offenders
In June 2025 ICE and the Florida governor’s office touted a weeklong statewide operation that produced 1,120 arrests and emphasized that 63% of those arrested had "existing criminal arrests or convictions," naming individuals convicted of homicide, sexual assault of a child, incest with a minor, drug offenses and gang-related crimes as examples [1] [2]. Subsequent targeted operations in late 2025 and early 2026 — labeled Operation Dirtbag/Operation Criminal Return and other regional sweeps — were framed similarly, with ICE and DHS releases listing arrests of dozens or hundreds of people described as sexual predators, violent criminals, fraudsters and drug offenders and citing specific convictions in their press packages [4] [5] [6].
2. What independent reporting and dataset summaries show: many arrests without serious convictions
Local and investigative outlets using ICE data or reporting on local offices found a different balance in portions of ICE’s workload: WUSF’s review of ICE arrests through June 10, 2025, summarized data from The Deportation Data Project and noted that noncriminal arrests (people without criminal charges or convictions) rose and by early June had surpassed arrests of people with criminal convictions in Florida; WUSF also cites a Cato Institute analysis that more than 90% of those booked into detention nationally were neither violent nor property-crime offenders, with many of the "most serious" labels reflecting immigration violations, traffic infractions or nonviolent vice crimes [3]. National local-office reporting from Dallas found in 2025 that migrants with pending charges but no convictions became the largest group among arrests there — indicating regional variation and a growing share of non-convicted people in ICE arrests [7].
3. Arrests by alleged offense categories reported in press materials
ICE and DHS press releases for Florida operations emphasize sexual offenses (including sexual assault of minors, lewd and lascivious conduct and child exploitation), homicide, kidnapping, robbery, drug offenses, fraud, gang-related violent offenses and illegal reentry as the alleged or previously convicted offenses that motivated arrests; specific counts reported vary by operation — for example, one November 2025 briefing tallied 54 sexual predators and 164 sexual-offense offenders among 230 arrests and listed two convicted murderers, one drug-trafficking conviction and other felonies [8] [4] [5]. Those government tallies are selective: they highlight the most serious categories to justify targeted operations, rather than presenting a neutral, line‑by‑line frequency table of all alleged offenses for the full span 2025–2026 [4] [8].
4. Limits, caveats and competing agendas in the available data
Sourcing must be cautious: ICE and Florida executive communications have an explicit enforcement/ political agenda — emphasizing the "worst of the worst" to demonstrate results — while investigative outlets using partial ICE datasets show trends that complicate that narrative, such as growth in arrests of people without convictions or whose most serious records are immigration or traffic offenses [2] [3] [7]. No single public release among the supplied sources provides a complete disaggregated dataset for all Florida ICE arrests in 2025–2026 by conviction status (convicted vs. pending vs. none) and by standardized offense categories; available accounts are fragmentary (press releases and operation tallies) or cover limited time windows or regions (data through June 10, Dallas office findings) [3] [1] [7].
5. Bottom line: what can be stated and what remains unknown
It can be stated with sourcing that major Florida operations in 2025 produced large numbers of arrests and that ICE/Florida officials reported a majority-share (63%) with existing criminal arrests/convictions in at least one operation, while independent analyses and other local-office reporting show an increasing proportion of arrests without serious violent or property convictions nationally and in some regions [1] [2] [3] [7]. What cannot be fully answered from the supplied reporting is a complete, year‑wide numeric breakdown for Florida in 2025–2026 that cross-tabulates every ICE arrest by conviction status and by standardized alleged-offense category — that granular public dataset is not provided in these sources, and producing it would require access to ICE’s full arrest-level records or a consolidated publicly released table not present here [3] [1].