What proportion of ICE arrests classified as 'pending charges' are later dismissed or do not result in convictions?
Executive summary
There is no clear, authoritative figure in the provided reporting that states what proportion of ICE arrests labeled as having “pending charges” are later dismissed or fail to result in convictions; ICE’s public statistics break arrests into categories including “pending criminal charges” but do not publish a national charge‑outcome (dismissal/conviction) rate in the cited releases [1]. Independent analysts and advocacy groups paint divergent pictures—some leaked data and research indicate many detainees have no convictions or even no pending charges, and reporting and agency statements conflict about how many arrestees are truly convicted criminals versus those merely with allegations pending [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. What the official numbers actually show — categories, not outcomes
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations dashboard and public statistics explicitly categorize arrests by criminal history, including a bucket described as people with “pending criminal charges in the United States,” but the agency’s public releases show counts by category rather than follow‑up outcomes of those pending charges, so the data do not by themselves answer how many pending charges were later dismissed or failed to produce convictions [1].
2. Conflicting narratives from government and independent sources
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have asserted that large majorities of recent arrests are of people with convictions or pending charges—DHS cited a 70% figure for arrests involving convictions or pending charges in public messaging [4] [5]—while independent analyses and leaked datasets presented by groups such as Cato and the American Immigration Council emphasize that, by other measures, a very substantial share of people arrested or detained had no criminal convictions and that many had no charges at all, exposing a tension in how “criminal arrests” are being counted [2] [3].
3. Local snapshots show a meaningful share listed as “pending” — but not what happened next
State‑level reporting and local dashboards can show the share of ICE arrests classified as having pending charges at the moment of arrest—for example, reporting from Utah’s data dashboard found roughly 22–27% of recent ICE arrests in that sample were of people categorized as having pending criminal charges [6]. Those local figures document classification at arrest but, again, do not track the legal disposition of those pending charges in a way that produces a national dismissal or acquittal rate [6] [1].
4. Evidence that some “pending charges” are dismissed or were minor is present but not quantified
Reporting and agency press releases include individual examples where charges were dismissed or were later described as minor: the DHS/ICE press corps materials and local ICE releases list cases that include pending counts that do not survive to conviction—one ICE release notes a charge that was dismissed in the past for an individual while still listing other pending allegations for the same person [7]. Advocacy reporting and leaked analyses argue pending charges are “often minor and regularly dismissed,” but those sources do not provide a systematic, verifiable national dismissal rate in the material provided [2].
5. Why the exact proportion cannot be stated from the provided reporting
None of the supplied sources supplies a national, longitudinal dataset that links an individual ICE arrest flagged as “pending charges” to the ultimate outcome in criminal court (dismissal, acquittal, conviction, plea), and the available public ICE tables count arrests by status at intake rather than by later judicial disposition—therefore a precise proportion of pending‑charge arrests that are later dismissed or do not lead to conviction cannot be derived from the documents given [1] [8].
6. Where to look next to answer the question definitively
To produce an evidence‑based percentage requires merging arrest intake records with court disposition records; the Deportation Data Project and TRAC’s immigration datasets have the kind of linked records and historical FOIA releases that could be used for that tracing if matched to state and federal court outcomes, and ICE’s original FOIA data releases (cited by the Deportation Data Project) would be the starting point for such an audit [8] [9]. In the absence of that matched analysis in the supplied reporting, only qualified statements—such as “many pending charges are minor or later do not result in conviction, according to some independent analyses”—are supportable [2] [3].