What are the most common crimes handled by ICE field offices in 2025?
Executive summary
ICE field offices in 2025 most frequently processed non-violent and administrative offenses — traffic-related criminal convictions (including DUI and other criminal motor-vehicle offenses), immigration-status violations, and lower-level drug possession charges — rather than a preponderance of violent felonies, although the agency and DHS spotlight high-profile violent arrests in publicity campaigns [1] [2] [3] [4]. Interpretation is constrained by gaps and regional variation in ICE’s released arrest and detention datasets and by how “most serious charge” is recorded in different field offices [5].
1. What “handled by ICE field offices” actually measures and its limits
“Handled” in available reporting primarily means administrative arrests, detainers, detentions and removals recorded in ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) datasets and compiled by projects like the Deportation Data Project; these records report a single “most serious criminal charge” per case and can omit arrests by other agencies such as CBP, produce duplicates, and have missing state or AOR fields — all of which complicate national tallies and comparisons across field offices [5].
2. The headline crimes: traffic/DUI, immigration-status offenses, and drug possession
Across multiple local analyses and ICE’s own historical summaries, the most common convictions among people arrested or booked into ICE custody in 2025 were traffic-related offenses (including DUI and criminal traffic like hit-and-run), immigration-status violations, and lower-level drug offenses; ICE’s ERO materials explicitly list DUI, drug possession and non-civil traffic offenses as historically most common, and state-level reporting from Nevada, Colorado and New Jersey finds traffic or driving-under-the-influence charges topping the lists where convictions exist [2] [3] [5] [1].
3. Violent crime is a small share — but high-profile violent arrests are emphasized
Independent analyses show violent-conviction rates among detainees were low in 2025 (roughly 4–5% in the datasets cited), and in several field offices a large share of people arrested had no convictions at all; for example, one analysis found only about 2% of arrests in a Massachusetts period had violent convictions while 63% had no criminal charges, and broader dataset summaries indicate about 5% of detainees had violent crime convictions [6] [1]. At the same time, DHS and ICE press releases repeatedly highlight arrests of “worst of the worst” offenders — child rapists, murderers, gang members — which are factual but numerically limited and serve a clear public-relations and policy narrative [4] [7] [8].
4. Regional variation and operational drivers shape what ICE field offices encounter
ICE field offices cover very different geographies and work with local partners; southern and southeastern offices produced the largest daily arrest numbers in late 2025 while other regions reported far fewer daily arrests, and the mix of charges varies by office — e.g., Salt Lake City’s region showed traffic and drug offenses as the most common, Colorado’s “most serious charge” skewed to DUI, and New Jersey reported a large share of pending charges without convictions [2] [3] [5]. Operational directives, reported daily arrest targets and coordination with state/local law enforcement also influence who gets referred to ICE and thus the charge mix [2].
5. Reading the data beyond the rhetoric: implications and caveats
The combined evidence shows ICE field offices most commonly process low- to mid-level criminal traffic offenses, immigration-status violations and drug-possession cases in 2025, not a mass population of violent felons; however, official communications amplify violent-arrest successes and enforcement priorities, and data gaps — incomplete processing records, differences in recording “most serious” charges, and the exclusion of some agency arrests — mean national inferences should be cautious and localized examination is necessary [4] [9]. Reporting and oversight groups note these mismatches between rhetoric and data, recommending more transparent, complete datasets from ICE to allow rigorous accountability and policy evaluation [9].