What proportion of people ICE detains after jail transfers have criminal convictions versus civil immigration cases, by state?

1. What ICE officially records and how it classifies detainees

ICE’s public statistics categorize detained people as those with criminal convictions, those with pending criminal charges, and those with no convictions or pending charges but removable for immigration reasons, and the agency emphasizes that local field offices and Alternatives to Detention play roles in assessing supervision and detention needs ^[4].

2. National picture: most people in ICE detention lack criminal convictions

Multiple independent analyses using ICE data and TRAC compilations converge on the same headline: a large share of those in ICE custody—often reported as roughly two-thirds to three-quarters—have no criminal conviction; TRAC/Syracuse data cited by fact-checkers put the number at about 72% of people in ICE detention as of September 21, 2025 (42,755 of 59,762) who had no criminal conviction ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

3. What “no criminal conviction” means in practice and contested readings

Advocates and researchers stress that many people detained without convictions were stopped or booked at local jails and transferred to ICE custody on civil immigration grounds (overstay, illegal entry/reentry), and that minor local offenses (traffic violations, DUI, low-level drug possession) account for a portion of those listed as “criminal,” complicating binary characterizations of who is being detained ^{[2] [5]}.

4. Why state-by-state proportions are hard to produce from the available reporting

The sources provided summarize national totals and offer field-office or county examples, but none of them publish a consistent, fully disaggregated, and corroborated table of detainees transferred from local jails by state that splits criminal convictions versus civil-only immigration cases; academic and watchdog pieces repeatedly note gaps and limited transparency in ICE’s public reporting, especially for fine-grained geographic breakdowns ^{[4] [5] [6]}.

5. Evidence of jurisdictional variation and the drivers behind it

Reporting from Vera, Prison Policy and news investigations documents that local policies, 287(g) agreements, and jail cooperation heavily shape who ends up transferred to ICE custody—places that cooperate closely with ICE or have jail contracts tend to produce more jail-to-ICE transfers—so proportions almost certainly vary by state and county even though consistent statewide figures are not published in the provided sources ^{[5] [6] [7]}.

6. Bottom line and what reliable next steps look like for state-by-state answers

The defensible, evidence-backed national conclusion is that a majority of people ICE detained following jail transfers have no criminal conviction (roughly 65–72% in the sources cited), while a minority have convictions (with violent-conviction shares reported in single digits), but an exact state-by-state breakdown cannot be produced from the documents supplied here because the underlying public datasets and reporting summarized do not publish a complete, validated state-level split of jail-transfer detainees by conviction status ^{[1] [2] [8]}; obtaining that breakdown would require either ICE’s full line-level detention records by state or TRAC/Syracuse-style extractions filtered to state and conviction-status, neither of which are present in the provided sources ^{[4] [3]}.