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What are the top 5 crimes leading to ICE arrests in 2025?
Executive summary
ICE public press releases in 2025 highlight arrests of people convicted of numerous violent and sexual offenses; frequent categories named across those releases include sexual offenses (child sexual abuse/pedophilia), violent assault/homicide, kidnapping/robbery/aggravated robbery, drug trafficking/possession, and property crimes (theft/burglary) [1] [2] [3]. Independent reporting and analyses note shifts in ICE practice — a rapid scale‑up of interior arrests and a large detention population — but say many detained people have no criminal record, complicating claims about an overall “top crimes” ranking [4] [5].
1. What ICE’s own releases emphasize: “the worst of the worst”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly frame 2025 enforcement as focused on the “worst of the worst,” and their dozens of individual press releases list the same sorts of convictions: sexual crimes against children (sexual conduct with a minor, indecency, lascivious acts), rape and sexual exploitation, homicide and attempted homicide, aggravated assault (including with a deadly weapon), kidnapping and aggravated robbery, drug trafficking and DUI/hit‑and‑run, and property crimes like theft and burglary [1] [2] [3] [6]. Those repeated categories are the programmatic emphasis in DHS messaging and therefore appear as the most‑cited offense types in ICE’s 2025 public communications [1].
2. If you ask “top 5” crimes as shown in ICE releases, here’s a defensible list
Based solely on frequency and prominence across ICE’s news items, the five most repeatedly cited crime types are: [7] child/sexual offenses (child sexual abuse, sexual conduct with a minor), [8] violent assault and aggravated assault (including deadly‑weapon assaults), [9] homicide/murder and attempted homicide, [10] kidnapping/aggravated robbery/carjacking, and [11] drug offenses (trafficking/dealing) — with property crimes (theft, burglary, larceny) appearing often as well [2] [3] [6] [12]. ICE releases also call out DUI and other dangerous‑driving offenses when highlighted [2].
3. What the rest of the reporting adds: volume, detention policy and nuance
Journalistic reporting places ICE’s press emphasis in a broader context: 2025 saw a surge in interior enforcement and a rapid expansion of detention capacity, with ICE holding nearly 60,000 people and recording a spike in deaths in custody — facts that show enforcement intensity but do not map one‑to‑one onto a ranked “top crimes” list [4]. The Guardian’s analysis of government data reports that while ICE says 70% of arrests are of people “convicted or charged with crimes,” the largest single group in detention in 2025 were people with no criminal record, underscoring that ICE’s public crime roster and total arrest demographics diverge [5].
4. Competing perspectives and possible messaging incentives
DHS/ICE press releases have an explicit enforcement and recruitment agenda; they repeatedly invite applications to ICE and use strong language to justify aggressive interior operations, which creates an incentive to highlight violent and sexual crimes in summaries [13] [1]. Advocates and independent reporting point to different incentives: documenting non‑criminal detentions and conditions in custody raises questions about whether the publicized “top crimes” fully represent ICE activity [5] [4]. Both perspectives are present in the available sources: DHS underscores violent/sexual crimes arrested by ICE [2], while news outlets emphasize scale, non‑criminal detentions, and consequences of rapid expansion [4] [5].
5. Limits of the available evidence — what we cannot say from these sources
Available sources do not provide a comprehensive, quantitative ranking (e.g., counts or percentages) of specific crimes leading to all ICE arrests in 2025; DHS press releases list illustrative cases and recurring categories but do not publish a consolidated “top 5 crimes by number of arrests” in the provided material [1] [2]. National reporting does give context about detention numbers and policy but does not convert DHS’s case‑by‑case releases into a verified numeric top‑five list [4] [5]. Therefore, a strict numeric ranking with precise counts is not available in the current reporting.
6. Practical takeaway for readers and researchers
If you want a defensible answer grounded in official messaging, the five most prominent crime categories in ICE’s 2025 public releases are: child/sexual offenses, violent assault/aggravated assault, homicide/attempted homicide, kidnapping/robbery/carjacking, and drug offenses — with property crimes (theft/burglary) also frequently cited [2] [3] [6]. If you need a validated, numeric “top 5” by arrest counts across the agency, request ICE’s official arrest dataset or a government compilation referenced by independent analysts; the available press releases and reporting do not supply that dataset or per‑offense totals [1] [4] [5].