What proportion of ICE arrests are for reentry after deportation versus new criminal convictions?
Executive summary
ICE interior-arrest data released through academic requests show that roughly half of people arrested by ICE in recent years did not have a criminal conviction; among those with convictions, convicted criminals comprised about 36% of interior arrests between Feb. 2021 and Dec. 2024, with roughly 51% classified as “other immigration violators” (which includes reentry after deportation and people with final orders) [1]. Local and national reporting from December 2025 documents wide variation by place and period — some city-by-city counts show 27–48% of recent ICE arrests were of people with convictions, while many of the newly rounded-up arrests lacked any criminal record [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Arrest categories: what ICE’s dashboards actually report
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) dashboards separate interior arrests into convicted criminals, those with pending charges, and a third “other” group that includes people with no convictions as well as those who reentered after deportation or those with final orders of removal; ICE’s public dashboards therefore do not map cleanly to a simple “reentry vs. new criminal conviction” split without further breakdown [4]. Available reporting and ICE notes say the “other” category explicitly includes repeated reentry after deportation and immigration fugitives, but ICE does not in its public dashboards always publish a single line that isolates reentry-after-deportation counts for every period [4].
2. National snapshot: roughly half of ICE interior arrests lack a criminal conviction
A detailed tally covering Feb. 2021–Dec. 2024 found that of about 500,842 ICE interior arrests, roughly 36.2% were convicted criminals, 12.8% had pending charges, and about 51% fell into “other immigration violators” — a group that contains people who reentered after deportation as well as others without criminal records [1]. Multiple news analyses of 2025 operations — using FOIA data assembled by the Deportation Data Project — show the share of arrests without criminal convictions rose as enforcement expanded, with national reporting indicating the share with convictions fell in some periods from about 46% to the high 20s in mid-October 2025 [5] [6].
3. Variation on the ground: cities and regions differ sharply
Local reporting finds big geographic differences. New York City data show only about 27% of ICE arrestees were convicted criminals in the first six months of the Trump administration, while Northern California reporting showed that in September 48% of those arrested had no criminal history and 39% had convictions — illustrating that how arrests are conducted and whom agencies target varies dramatically by office and operation [2] [3]. San Diego reporting similarly found more than half of arrests in 2025 involved people with no criminal convictions or pending charges [7].
4. Reentry-after-deportation: included but not always isolated in public counts
Reentry after deportation is explicitly listed among the “other immigration violators” in ICE’s categories, but the public dashboards and several media analyses often group those reentries with other non-criminal immigration violations rather than reporting a distinct percentage for reentry alone [4] [1]. That means available public summaries can tell you the combined share of non-convicted/non-pending cases but not always the precise slice that is reentry after removal without additional data processing [4] [1].
5. Competing interpretations and political framing
Advocates and researchers say the data show ICE is sweeping in many people with no criminal records and that enforcement priorities shifted toward producing large arrest tallies [6] [8]. The administration and some officials frame arrests as focused on public-safety threats; independent analyses and local reporting counter that a growing share of arrests are for minor offenses, traffic violations, or pure immigration violations, diluting the proportion that are new criminal-conviction-based arrests [6] [9] [10].
6. What’s not resolved by current public reporting
Available sources do not provide a single, nationwide percentage that isolates “reentry after deportation” alone across the full set of ICE interior arrests for the most recent periods; ICE’s public dashboards bundle reentry with other non-criminal immigration violators, and news organizations have produced varying decompositions that depend on their sample and timeframe [4] [1]. If you need an exact nationwide split of reentry-versus-new-criminal-conviction arrests, that figure is not published in the cited dashboards or the summarized news stories without further FOIA or academic breakdowns [4] [1].
7. Bottom line for readers
Use caution with simple soundbites: current public ICE dashboards and multiple investigative reports show that convicted criminals are often less than half of interior ICE arrests in recent enforcement surges and that a large portion of arrests fall into an “other” category that includes reentry after deportation — but the precise share that is specifically reentry after deportation is not directly reported in a single nationwide line and varies by region and time period [1] [4] [2].