Percentage of current ice detainees with criminal convictions

1. What the numbers in reporting actually show

Analysts using ICE’s public data find that roughly 29–31 percent of people in ICE custody in 2025 had criminal convictions, meaning roughly 69–71 percent did not; Cato’s mid-November analysis reported about 69 percent of ICE-arrested detainees had no conviction (implying about 31 percent did) and MinnPost summarized ICE figures as about 29 percent convicted and 71 percent with no convictions for 2025 ^{[2] [1]}. Independent watchdogs and law‑fare groups echo those proportions: the Brennan Center summarized Cato’s finding that about 35 percent of arrested individuals had some criminal offense listed (with only a small fraction violent), and multiple outlets have observed that the share of detainees with violent convictions is particularly small—often reported at about 5–7 percent ^{[4] [2]}.

2. Snapshots, trends, and important caveats in the data

These headline percentages are snapshots that change over short timeframes and depend on definitions: ICE’s public statistics separate people with convictions, people with pending charges, and those with no criminal record, but how ICE and reporters classify “criminal” varies—ICE sometimes counts pending charges or immigration offenses differently than outside analysts, and short-term surges in detentions (for example after policy shifts) can skew month-to-month shares ^{[5] [2]}. Some reporting focused on narrower windows finds even lower shares of convicted detainees—Stateline reported a tiny share (as low as 3 percent) for a specific September period—underscoring how volatile these percentages are depending on the exact date range and whether immigration violations (e.g., illegal reentry) are treated as convictions ^[6].

3. What “no conviction” actually means in these accounts

When a majority of detainees are described as having “no criminal convictions,” that group can include people with pending charges that may later be dismissed or converted to convictions, people charged only with immigration violations like illegal entry or reentry, and individuals who have violated civil immigration law but have no criminal record in the United States—analysts caution that many of the pending charges are minor and often dismissed, which is why Cato and others highlight the difference between “pending charge” and “conviction” in ICE’s tallies ^{[2] [7]}.

4. Political context, competing narratives, and limits of available reporting

The Trump administration’s public messaging that enforcement is targeted at the “worst of the worst” contrasts with the data-driven finding that a majority of detainees lack criminal convictions, a divergence emphasized by advocacy groups and watchdogs and repeated in multiple news reports ^{[4] [2]}; at the same time, ICE’s own statistics and procedural descriptions explain custody determinations consider criminal history among many factors but do not by themselves resolve the question of proportionality or public‑safety rationale ^[5]. Reporting limitations remain: publicly available summaries and third‑party analyses rely on ICE’s published datasets and aggregate snapshots; they do not uniformly reconcile differences in classification, and neither ICE’s raw tables nor the secondary analyses fully disclose the disposition history for every detainee over time, so precise, real‑time percentages will vary with updates and methodological choices ^{[5] [2]}.

5. Bottom line for readers following the debate

Multiple independent analyses of ICE’s published data in 2025–early 2026 converge on the bottom line that roughly 29–31 percent of ICE detainees had criminal convictions during the referenced reporting periods, leaving roughly 69–71 percent without convictions according to those same datasets; other shorter‑window analyses sometimes report lower conviction shares, and classification differences (conviction vs. pending charge vs. immigration offense) are the main source of divergence across reports ^{[1] [2] [6]}.