How does ICE categorize 'criminals' versus immigration violators in its public data releases?
Executive summary
ICE’s public data classifies people it arrests into discrete criminal-history buckets—those with U.S. criminal convictions, those with pending criminal charges, and a residual “other immigration violator” group for people with no convictions or pending charges but who have violated immigration law—while treating most arrests as administrative (civil) immigration actions rather than criminal arrests; independent analysts say those labels can mask who actually has foreign convictions, pending charges elsewhere, or simply crossed into the United States, and different stakeholders dispute the share that are “criminals.” [1] [2]
1. What the labels are and what they mean in ICE’s own schema
ICE’s public dashboards and enforcement summaries break arrests into categories that explicitly include (a) people with U.S. criminal convictions, (b) people with pending criminal charges in the United States, and (c) people with “no convictions or pending charges” who nevertheless violated immigration law (often called “Other Immigration Violators”)—a category that can include visa overstays, Visa Waiver Program violators, and repeat immigration offenders, and for recent years also includes people apprehended unlawfully entering after a policy date cutoff. [1]
2. Administrative arrest vs. criminal arrest: a legal distinction that matters
ICE’s “arrests” are usually administrative detentions based on civil immigration law, not criminal arrests; scholars and guides note that an administrative arrest is detaining someone for a civil immigration violation, and only under specific statutory conditions may ICE effect a criminal arrest in the course of immigration enforcement. That legal distinction means ICE’s public “criminal history” buckets are descriptive of a person’s record, not a declaration that the enforcement action itself is criminal. [2]
3. How the “other immigration violator” category functions as a catch-all
The “other immigration violator” label captures people without known convictions or pending U.S. charges in ICE’s system at the time of the enforcement action, which includes border crossers and overstays; ICE uses that label in public releases while also noting exceptions and special subcategories for certain time periods (for example, those apprehended after a policy date) — but the label does not necessarily capture foreign convictions, unrecorded charges, or intelligence-based reasons for targeting. [1]
4. Data quirks, reporting changes and limits on interpretation
Researchers warn that ICE’s datasets have structural quirks: point-in-time counts, changes in how custodial arrests are coded (for example consolidating Criminal Alien Program arrests into a “Custodial Arrests” category), and the absence of cross-linked identifiers in some releases make longitudinal or person-level tracing difficult; those reporting choices can change the apparent composition of who ICE is arresting. [3] [4]
5. The contested statistics: administration claims vs. independent analyses
DHS spokespeople have defended enforcement by saying around 70% of people ICE arrests have convictions or pending charges, a framing used to emphasize criminal targeting, but independent analyses and media investigations have found the opposite distribution in recent releases—multiple outlets and researchers report that a growing share of arrests and detainees have no U.S. criminal convictions, in some analyses a majority or more, and that violent-crime convictions are a small fraction of total cases. Those conflicting claims reflect both differing analytic choices and the underlying categories ICE publishes. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
6. What the categories don’t tell the public
ICE’s public categories do not always disclose whether a person has foreign convictions, whether pending charges later led to convictions, nor the full factual context for an enforcement action; analysts emphasize that labels like “non‑criminal” in ICE’s system mean “no convictions or pending charges in ICE’s records at the time,” not an absolute statement about culpability, and critics warn that political framing can conflate narrow database labels with broader narratives about “criminal aliens.” [1] [6] [2]
7. Stakes and implications for reporting and policy debates
Because the agency’s buckets are legally and operationally specific but easily spun for political purposes, journalists and policymakers must read ICE’s public categories alongside methodological caveats and independent reanalyses: administration officials use the conviction/pending-charge metric to justify broad raids, while watchdogs and data projects point to the rising share of immigration-only arrests to question claims about targeting the “worst of the worst.” The data exist, but interpretation hinges on reporting choices, coding changes, and what the labels omit. [5] [7] [6] [3]