What are the statistics on wrongful arrests by ICE during the Obama administration compared to Trump?
Executive summary
Measured counts of "wrongful arrests" by ICE are not compiled as a discrete, agency‑reported statistic, so researchers and advocates use proxies—collateral arrests, arrests of people with no criminal record, and at‑large/community arrests—to compare the Obama and Trump eras; those proxies show far higher rates of non‑criminal or collateral apprehensions under Trump than under Obama, but they do not equate perfectly to legally wrongful arrests and the available datasets have gaps and differing definitions [1] [2] [3].
1. How “wrongful arrests” are being measured — a methodological caveat
There is no single public ICE metric labeled “wrongful arrests,” so analysts rely on related measures such as the share of interior arrests involving people without criminal records, instances of collateral arrests in raids, and at‑large or community arrests; this creates unavoidable ambiguity when comparing administrations because definitions, reporting windows and ICE dashboards change over time, and ICE’s online dashboards begin only in late 2020, limiting direct apples‑to‑apples comparisons [3] [1].
2. The Obama baseline: targeted enforcement and lower collateral rates
Reporting from the Obama era emphasized targeted arrests of individuals with criminal histories and avoided broad “sweeps” that produced collateral arrests; TRAC’s FY2016 accounting shows 65,332 people detained and deported in FY2016 as a baseline year, and contemporaneous accounts noted that about 25 percent of one 680‑person operation lacked criminal records, implying most arrests were of people with criminal histories under Obama guidance [1].
3. The Trump surge: dramatic increases in non‑criminal and at‑large arrests
Multiple sources document a marked shift under Trump toward at‑large, community and worksite arrests with large increases in people without criminal records: the American Immigration Council reported that arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450 percent in Trump’s first year and that the percent of people in ICE custody with no criminal record rose from 6 percent in January to 41 percent by December of that year, evidence that collateral or non‑criminal apprehensions became far more common [2].
4. Numerical context and enforcement visibility under Trump
The Trump administration made arrests and deportations more visible and aggressive, with reporting noting ICE administrative arrests and removals rose in publicity and scale; for example, DHS/ICE reported 33,242 at‑large arrests in FY2024 and the first 50 days of Trump’s second term produced 32,809 at‑large arrests, signaling both operational intensity and a shift toward community encounters as a primary arrest source [4] [5].
5. Competing interpretations and political framing
Defenders of the more aggressive enforcement argue the goal is to remove the “worst of the worst” and that rising numbers reflect policy priorities rather than legal error, while critics and oversight groups portray the surge in non‑criminal detentions as evidence of wrongful or unjustified arrests and an erosion of accountability; former ICE and DHS officials have voiced concerns about politicized enforcement and rushed responses, and analysts such as the Center for Immigration Studies counter that detention patterns vary by administration and dataset, highlighting the influence of definitional choices and reporting windows [4] [3] [6].
6. Bottom line and limits of the record
On the available evidence, proxies for wrongful arrests—especially the share of detainees without criminal records and rates of community/at‑large arrests—rose dramatically under Trump compared with the Obama period, with published figures showing thousands‑fold percentage increases in some measures and a jump from low single‑digit percentages to around forty percent in custody without criminal records during a single year; however, because ICE does not publish a standardized “wrongful arrest” stat and because reporting windows and categorizations differ, the precise comparative count of legally wrongful arrests cannot be definitively stated from public sources alone [2] [1] [3].