What is the probability of a green card holder to be arrested and detained by ICE, relative to the probability that they would die in a car accident?
Executive summary
Available reporting shows ICE detention totals surged in 2025 to roughly the high‑tens of thousands, and that lawful permanent residents (green card holders) can and do get arrested or detained under specific circumstances, but the provided sources do not include a clear numerator (how many green card holders were detained) or a matched denominator (how many green card holders exist) needed to produce a numeric probability — and they also contain no authoritative car‑crash mortality rate to allow a direct quantitative comparison [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. ICE detention volumes rose dramatically in 2025, but they’re reported as aggregate counts
Advocacy and watchdog reporting documents a near‑75% jump in the number of people held in ICE detention during 2025 — from roughly 40,000 early in the year to about 66,000 by December — and agency tallies published in January 2026 show detention population snapshots near 69,000, establishing that detention volumes are high and rising [1] [2]. These are totals of detained people, not counts broken down by immigration status such as lawful permanent residents, so the headline figures cannot by themselves answer the probability that an individual green card holder will be arrested or detained [1] [2].
2. Green card holders are not categorically immune: law and practice allow some LPR detentions
Legal guidance and immigration practitioners emphasize that lawful permanent resident status does not create absolute immunity; under the Immigration and Nationality Act certain convictions and some immigration violations can expose LPRs to arrest, detention and removal proceedings, and commentators note ICE operations and airport detentions have included green card holders [3] [5] [4]. Individual reporting and litigation records cited by news outlets document specific green card holders who were detained and, in at least one tragic case, died in custody — demonstrating that the phenomenon exists though sources stop short of saying it is a common outcome for all LPRs [4] [3].
3. A large share of people in ICE custody have no criminal conviction — complicating inferences about who is detained
Multiple independent analyses and data summaries show a rising share of people detained by ICE have no recorded U.S. criminal conviction: one dataset found the share without convictions doubled over a reporting period and news analyses reported that in some operations more than half of those arrested had no criminal record [6] [7]. Another civil‑society summary placed the proportion without convictions among those held at roughly 73.6% as of November 30, 2025, underscoring that ICE detentions include many people beyond the stereotypical “criminal alien” and that detention risk is not solely concentrated among those with felony records [8] [6].
4. Why a direct probability comparison to car‑accident death cannot be made from the supplied reporting
To compute “the probability of a green card holder being arrested and detained by ICE” requires (at minimum) a count of LPRs detained in a defined period and the total number of green card holders in the same population and period; none of the provided sources give both those figures in a way that permits a reliable per‑person rate for LPRs specifically [1] [8] [2]. Likewise, the supplied corpus contains no authoritative car‑accident mortality rate to use as the comparator, so any numeric statement that a green card holder is more or less likely to be detained than to die in a car crash would be speculative beyond the sources at hand [1] [2] [8].
5. Qualified, evidence‑based conclusion and what would be needed for a numeric answer
The evidence establishes that green card holders can and have been detained by ICE, and that tens of thousands of people were held in ICE custody in 2025 — often including people without criminal convictions — but the supplied reporting does not permit calculating a per‑green‑card‑holder arrest/detention probability nor a direct numerical comparison to automobile fatality risk [1] [8] [6] [4] [3]. To answer the user’s comparative question numerically would require (a) official or vetted data on how many LPRs were arrested/detained in a specific time frame, (b) the contemporaneous count of LPRs in the population (denominator), and (c) a reliable car‑accident death rate for the same period; none of those denominators or matched datasets are present in the provided sources [1] [8] [2]. The reporting does allow a confident qualitative statement: detention by ICE of green card holders is a real, documented risk under current enforcement practices, but whether that risk, expressed as a probability, is smaller or larger than the risk of dying in a car accident cannot be determined from the material supplied [1] [3] [8].