How many ICE removals in 2025 and 2026 were of individuals with felony convictions according to ERO data?

1. What the question asks and why it’s not trivial

The user asks for a specific tally: among ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) removals in 2025 and 2026, how many were of people who had felony convictions according to ERO data; that requires a removals file with a reliable “criminality” or conviction-status field and complete coverage for the period in question, and the available ERO releases and derivative datasets have been spotty, partial, and in some cases documented as incomplete or corrected by data custodians ^{[2] [3]}.

2. What ICE itself publishes that is relevant, and its limits

ICE’s public statistics and dashboards describe ERO roles and provide aggregate removals and detention reports as of December 31, 2024, and ongoing fiscal‑year statistics, but the dashboards present trends and high‑level breakdowns rather than a validated, line‑item removals table explicitly aggregating removals by felony conviction status for 2025 or 2026 in the materials cited here ^{[1] [6] [7]}. ICE’s FY statistics pages list removals totals for FY2025 and early FY2026 snapshots and detention breakdowns, and the agency’s annual report lists counts of convictions associated with detainers and detainees over multi‑year spans, but that is not the same as a removals-by-felony count for the specified years ^{[5] [6]}.

3. What independent researchers and data projects found — incomplete, corrected, or missing tables

Independent repositories and analysts — notably the Deportation Data Project and university teams that processed ICE releases — report that the most recent machine-readable release covering enforcement actions extended only through mid‑October 2025 and that the “removals” tables were unreliable in some early releases; the Deportation Data Project explicitly warned that some posted removals files were incomplete and recommended using corrected late‑July files rather than early June exports ^{[2] [3]}. TRAC and other trackers publish aggregate removals totals for FY2025 and partial FY2026 numbers (for example, a cited FY2026 removals figure of 56,392), but these are totals and do not reconcile to a removals-by-felony field in the ICE ERO dataset available to the public ^{[4] [8]}.

4. Where the mismatch comes from: definitions, fields, and reporting cadence

Part of the difficulty is definitional and technical: ICE splits operational records across arrests, detainers, bookings and removals, and the OHSS/DHS Persist dataset and ICE metadata indicate that “criminality” fields and agency coding practices have shifted, creating cases with incomplete location or conviction coding; these problems were flagged by data users and in ICE documentation, so a direct aggregation labeled “removals of people with felony convictions in 2025 and 2026” cannot be asserted confidently from the released files cited here ^{[9] [10] [11]}.

5. Direct answer and recommended next steps for a verifiable count

Direct answer: the reviewed ERO public releases and processed datasets made available through mid‑October 2025 do not provide a verifiable, published number of ICE ERO removals in 2025 and 2026 that are explicitly recorded as having felony convictions; therefore a precise numeric answer cannot be produced from the available sources ^{[2] [3] [1]}. To obtain a verifiable count, the appropriate next steps are to request the specific ERO removals extract containing the criminality field from ICE or DHS/OHSS Persist dataset for the full period (including any corrected “late July” removals table recommended by data custodians), to compare the field definition for “felony/aggravated felony” across datasets, and to seek clarification about post‑release corrections; legal or FOIA avenues and the Deportation Data Project’s processed files are the most direct paths researchers have used to get these reconciled figures ^{[3] [10] [2]}.