How does ICE define and record 'pending charges' and are those charges later verified in public data releases?
Executive summary
ICE defines "pending charges" as criminal charges that are outstanding against a noncitizen at the time of an enforcement action and records those charges in its system of record when the encounter, detainer, or arrest is processed [1]. Public ICE dashboards and FOIA-derived datasets report counts of people categorized as having "pending charges," but independent researchers warn that those labels are not consistently linked to later court outcomes, the data are sometimes updated retroactively, and key fields for verifying how a case was resolved are often missing [2] [3] [4].
1. How ICE defines “pending charges” in its operational systems
ICE treats "pending charges" operationally as any criminal charge recorded against a noncitizen at the time ICE encounters or arrests them; those charges are entered into ICE’s system of record at the moment of the enforcement action and used to classify individuals for reporting and operational decisions, including detainer requests and jail-based processing under programs like 287(g) [1] [5].
2. Where and how those charges are recorded in ICE data releases
ICE’s public Enforcement and Removal Operations dashboards and statistical releases include categories for "noncitizens with criminal convictions," "those with pending charges," and "those with no convictions or pending charges," and ICE publishes arrest, detainer, and detention tables that reflect those classifications [2] [6] [7]. FOIA-driven projects and the Deportation Data Project have republished ICE’s individual‑level tables (arrests, detainers, detentions, encounters), which contain the administrative flags that ICE uses to mark pending charges at the time of encounter [3] [4].
3. Limits to verification: why reported “pending charges” may not map cleanly to court outcomes
Independent data stewards note ICE sometimes updates records retroactively (for example when a removal occurs), which can change entries across arrests, encounters, detainers and detentions and produce inconsistencies between overlapping releases; crucially, ICE data do not reliably carry a link that shows the ultimate disposition of local criminal charges, and fields that might signal whether a detainer was honored or lifted are often missing—making it difficult to determine from ICE’s data alone whether a "pending charge" was later dismissed, resulted in conviction, or never advanced [4] [3].
4. What outside researchers and advocates have found when they compare ICE labels to actual criminal histories
Analysts and advocacy organizations using ICE’s public and FOIA data have found a substantial share of people flagged in ICE records lacked a recorded conviction in the agency’s datasets; TRAC and other analysts report that when low-level offenses (including traffic charges) are excluded, a majority of many detainers showed no conviction record in ICE data, and national press analyses found roughly a third of ICE arrests had no criminal record while many in the remainder were labeled as having pending charges rather than convictions [8] [9] [10].
5. Competing narratives and institutional incentives
ICE’s public framing highlights prioritization of arrests of people with convictions or pending charges to emphasize public‑safety goals, and ICE has repeatedly pointed to its dashboard as making such categorization transparent [2] [6]. Critics, including legal aid groups and data researchers, contend that administrative classifications like "pending charges" can be broad and operationally motivated—used to justify detention and detainers even where criminal cases are minor or later dismissed—and that ICE’s data structure and missing linkage to court outcomes can obscure the true criminal history of individuals [10] [11] [4].
6. Bottom line: what can and cannot be concluded from public ICE data
It is accurate to say ICE defines and records "pending charges" as charges outstanding at the time of enforcement and reports counts under that label in its data releases [1] [2], but public ICE datasets and FOIA releases generally do not provide a reliable, consistent mechanism to verify later court dispositions for those charges; researchers must rely on retrospective updates by ICE (which occur in a minority of cases), patchy fields like "Detainer Lift Reason," and separate court records—none of which are fully integrated in ICE’s public releases—so caution is required in claiming that ICE’s “pending charges” category equates to later criminal convictions [4] [3] [8].