Percentage of criminals arrested by ice
Executive summary
The question being asked — “Percentage of criminals arrested by ICE” — is ambiguous because sources differ on definitions (criminal arrest vs. administrative arrest of people with past convictions) and there is no authoritative published figure showing ICE’s share of all U.S. criminal arrests; available data instead allow measurement of what share of ICE’s own arrestees have criminal convictions or were arrested on criminal charges. ICE reported 149,070 total arrests by its two operational branches in FY2024, and within that set government analysis and think-tank reporting show that a substantial portion of people ICE books have no criminal convictions, while a smaller but significant slice have prior convictions or are arrested on criminal charges [1] [2] [3].
1. What the numbers can and cannot answer: definitions matter
“Criminals arrested by ICE” can mean at least three different things in the published record — arrests by ICE that were criminal investigations, ICE administrative arrests of people who previously have criminal convictions, or ICE’s share of all criminal arrests nationally — and ICE’s public statistics and independent analyses mostly quantify the first two but not the third, meaning one cannot credibly state what percentage of all U.S. criminal arrests are made by ICE from the provided sources [4] [5] [6].
2. ICE’s headline arrest totals and internal breakdowns
ICE’s two operational branches together recorded 149,070 arrests in FY2024 according to government-tracking compilations cited by USAFacts, which also note that 113,430 of those were classified as administrative arrests by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and that HSI carried out tens of thousands of criminal arrests [1]. Those figures are the starting point for any percentage calculations confined to ICE’s own data [1].
3. Share of ICE arrestees with criminal convictions or criminal charges — two ways to read the data
Within ICE’s FY2024 totals, one tabulation shows 57,690 people administratively arrested who had prior criminal convictions, a figure that represents roughly 39 percent of the 149,070 total arrests if those categories are compared directly (57,690 ÷ 149,070 ≈ 38.7%) [1]. Separately, USAFacts reports criminal-arrest counts of 3,032 by ERO and 32,608 by HSI — a combined 35,640 criminal arrests inside the agency’s total, which equals about 24 percent of the 149,070 total arrests (35,640 ÷ 149,070 ≈ 23.9%) [1]. Both calculations depend on how “criminal” is defined in ICE’s own tables and on mixing administrative vs. criminal-arrest categories [1].
4. Why other data appear to contradict these percentages
Independent trackers and advocates reading ICE’s fortnightly detention snapshots and FOIA-derived datasets emphasize a different headline: a large share of people booked into ICE custody have no criminal convictions. TRAC and multiple analyses report figures such as 73.6 percent of people in ICE detention having no criminal conviction (as of late 2025) and other analyses cite that a majority of recent detention growth has come from people with no convictions [3] [7]. Think tanks and news outlets synthesize ICE’s shifting reporting and show wide variation depending on the population measured (initial book-ins, currently detained population, or arrests) [2] [8].
5. The bottom line and caveats for readers
From the provided reporting, the most supportable statements are: within ICE’s FY2024 arrest totals, roughly 24 percent to 39 percent of those arrests can be characterized as connected to criminal charges or prior criminal convictions depending on the metric used — 24 percent if counting explicit criminal arrests by ERO and HSI, and about 39 percent if counting ERO administrative arrests of people with prior convictions — but there is no basis in these sources to compute ICE’s share of all criminal arrests in the United States because national criminal-arrest totals by civilian law enforcement are not provided or harmonized here [1] [6] [4]. All of these figures are sensitive to agency labeling, reporting windows, and whether “criminal” refers to present charges, past convictions, or type of arrest, and independent watchdogs warn ICE’s public reporting is incomplete and sometimes inconsistent [6] [8].