How does ICE define and report 'criminal history' versus 'pending charges' in its public statistics?
Executive summary
ICE’s public statistics categorize detainees by criminal history using mutually exclusive buckets—commonly “criminal convictions,” “pending criminal charges,” and “no criminal history”—and the agency reports arrests and detentions broken down by those labels alongside country of citizenship [1]. Independent analyses and legal experts warn that those labels do not map neatly onto public expectations about seriousness: ICE and DHS sometimes present “pending charges” alongside convictions in public messaging, and ICE’s counting rules place people with convictions (even if they also have pending charges) in the convictions bucket, complicating interpretation [2] [3] [4].
1. How ICE defines its categories in published statistics
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) dataset explicitly separates detained or arrested people into categories that include “individuals with criminal convictions” and “individuals with pending criminal charges,” and publishes arrest and detention tallies by those categories and by country of citizenship [1]. The agency’s public pages describe the categories but do not, on the landing page, provide granular coding manuals in the summaries; instead they present summary counts and breakdowns for arrests, removals and detention populations [1].
2. The crucial rule: convictions trump pending charges in ICE counting
When an individual has both a prior conviction and pending charges, ICE’s historical reporting practice is to count that person in the conviction category rather than the pending-charges category, meaning the buckets are effectively mutually exclusive for reporting purposes [2]. That rule matters because it means the “pending charges” column represents people with charges but no counted convictions, while the “convictions” column can include people with additional unresolved charges [2].
3. What counts as a “criminal” conviction or charge in ICE terms
ICE’s public descriptions and related analyses show that the agency’s criminal categories encompass a wide array of offenses—from violent crimes through DUI, drug possession, traffic offenses and immigration-related crimes—and that immigration-law concepts like “aggravated felony” can include offenses that the public may not view as severe [1] [4] [2]. ICE also notes inclusion of war criminals and people convicted or suspected of human-rights abuses in its criminal category when relevant, indicating that foreign convictions and international notices sometimes factor into enforcement narratives, although the agency’s summaries emphasize U.S. convictions and pending U.S. charges in the ERO breakdowns [1].
4. How ICE and political actors present the buckets versus independent analyses
DHS and ICE officials and allies frequently amalgamate convictions and pending charges when asserting that ICE is targeting “criminal illegal aliens,” while independent outlets and researchers have pointed out that including pending charges inflates the appearance of a wholly “criminal” detention population because pending charges are not convictions and are sometimes minor or dismissed [3] [5]. Journalistic and policy analyses using ICE data have shown substantial shares of detainees with no convictions and have emphasized that pending-charge counts vary by state and over time, complicating claims that ICE is principally detaining violent criminals [6] [7] [8].
5. Data limitations, transparency gaps and interpretive caution
Public reporting by ICE leaves room for ambiguity: detailed coding decisions, the handling of foreign convictions, whether arrests initiated by CBP are always disaggregated, and time lags in charge resolution are not fully exposed in the summary tables, prompting researchers to call for more proactive disclosure to verify claims about public-safety targeting [1] [9] [8]. Multiple watchdogs and academics caution that administrative immigration arrests can occur without criminal judicial warrants and that a sizable share of people in ICE custody have neither convictions nor pending U.S. charges, which is visible in the public tallies but often lost in political messaging [4] [9] [5].
6. Bottom line and implications for interpreting ICE counts
Interpreting ICE’s “criminal history” versus “pending charges” requires reading the categories as reporting constructs—convictions and pending charges are distinct buckets, with convictions taking precedence if both exist, and the content of those buckets spans minor to serious offenses and can include immigration-specific categories—so public claims that ICE detains mostly “criminals” often hinge on whether pending charges are treated as equivalent to convictions and on what offenses are included [2] [4] [3]. Because ICE’s public summaries do not fully disclose all coding and provenance decisions, independent researchers have filled gaps and urged greater transparency to assess whether enforcement aligns with stated public-safety priorities [9] [8].