Which U.S. cities have the highest proportion of immigrant arrests or convictions in 2020s?
Executive summary
The public record does not supply a definitive, nationwide list of U.S. cities ranked by the proportion of arrests or convictions that involve immigrants in the 2020s; instead, federal and advocacy datasets point to enforcement concentration in certain states and in local jails that cooperate with ICE, especially Texas and other fully collaborating states [1] [2]. Rigorous academic reviews also show immigrants are, on average, less likely than U.S.-born residents to be arrested or incarcerated, complicating simple “which cities” answers and demanding attention to enforcement policy as much as crime patterns [3] [4].
1. Enforcement geography: states and local jails drive the pattern, not neat city rankings
ICE, DHS and independent analysts publish monthly and state-level tallies that show large shares of arrests and detentions clustered in states that fully collaborate with federal immigration enforcement; Prison Policy’s analysis of ICE data found that high volumes of ICE arrests are concentrated in cooperating states and that nearly half of ICE arrests occur through local jails and lock‑ups [2]. TRAC and ICE statistics likewise show Texas detention facilities have housed the most people in recent federal fiscal reporting and that ICE administrative arrest data are organized by arresting agency and state [1] [5], which means most public datasets are structured to reveal state and arresting‑agency patterns rather than clean city-by-city conviction rates [6].
2. Why Texas (and some other states) appear dominant in the public record
Texas emerges repeatedly in the reporting because the state records arrests and convictions by immigration status more transparently than others, its detention capacity is large, and new state laws and local 287(g) agreements have expanded local‑to‑federal pipelines for arrests — producing a high visible share of ICE activity inside Texas jails [3] [7] [1]. Reporting shows ICE arrests in Texas rose after policy shifts, with a Tribune analysis cited in regional reporting saying more than half of ICE arrests in Texas stemmed from local jails under the revived federal enforcement posture [7]. That combination—strong collaboration, many detention beds, and explicit state measures requiring local cooperation—produces high counts tied to Texas cities and counties even if comparable city‑level conviction rate tables are not published nationally [7] [2].
3. Cities likely to rank high in raw enforcement counts — and why that may mislead
Border and large Texas metro areas (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and other county seats with 287(g) arrangements or SB‑style laws) are the jurisdictions most frequently named in news and government summaries as sites of intensified ICE activity, because local jails there funnel detainees to federal custody and state law can mandate cooperation [7] [8]. National enforcement bodies (ICE, CBP) publish arrest and conviction tallies by citizenship and arresting agency, but they do not publish a comprehensive, comparable “proportion of arrests that were immigrants” for every city; therefore cities that show high absolute volumes of ICE arrests in public reports are not necessarily the ones with the highest proportional rates per immigrant population [5] [9].
4. The data gap, the research context and competing narratives
Migration Policy and other researchers emphasize that, where systematic comparisons are possible (notably Texas), immigrants tend to have lower arrest and incarceration rates than U.S.-born residents, which undercuts narratives that higher enforcement equals higher immigrant criminality [3] [4]. Advocacy analyses warn the current enforcement pattern reflects policy choices — state laws, 287(g) task forces, and federal priorities — rather than underlying criminality: Prison Policy and others show arrests cluster where cooperation exists and where ICE can access local detainees [2]. That framing reveals an implicit agenda in some reporting: highlighting high enforcement counts in particular cities or states can serve political aims to portray immigrants as a crime problem, even though peer-reviewed and government analyses complicate that story [2] [3].
5. Bottom line for readers seeking city rankings
There is no authoritative, nationwide city ranking of “highest proportion of immigrant arrests or convictions in the 2020s” published in the available federal and civil‑society datasets; existing public evidence points to concentrated enforcement in Texas and other fully cooperating states and to local jails as the mechanism of concentration, while broader research shows immigrants are generally less likely to be arrested or convicted than the native‑born population where comparative data exist [1] [2] [3]. To produce a defensible city‑level ranking would require consistent city‑by‑city datasets that record immigration status in arrest and conviction records — a data product not available in the public sources provided here [6] [5].