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Fact check: How do ICE deportation numbers of criminals compare to overall deportation statistics in 2024?
Executive Summary
ICE reported a substantial rise in removals in fiscal year 2024 — roughly 271,000 deportations, the highest since 2014 and nearly double the prior year — but much of that increase reflects border apprehensions handled by CBP rather than interior arrests of people with criminal convictions, with about 82% of 2024 deportations involving migrants apprehended at the border [1] [2]. At the same time, ICE’s custody data and other analyses indicate a majority of people taken into ICE custody lacked criminal convictions, and independent reviews find limited evidence that interior arrest-and-removal activity of convicted criminals rose proportionally in 2024 [3] [4] [5].
1. Why the headline number jumped — a border surge, not a criminal sweep
ICE’s fiscal-year total of roughly 271,000 removals in 2024 represents a near ten-year high and a large year-over-year increase driven primarily by border apprehensions processed by Customs and Border Protection, which accounted for about 82% of those deportations; ICE’s own reporting and contemporary summaries emphasize that many removals followed CBP encounters rather than ICE interior enforcement operations [1] [2]. This distinction matters because CBP apprehensions typically involve recent crossers and asylum seekers rather than people arrested in U.S. communities for past crimes, so using the 271,000 figure alone overstates the scale of criminal deportations executed by ICE domestic enforcement teams [5].
2. Interior ICE arrests and removals: numbers tell a more nuanced story
Quarterly ICE reports highlighted spikes in removals in specific periods — for example, a nearly 70% increase in removals in Q3 of FY2024 compared with Q3 FY2023 and nearly 68,000 individual removals in that quarter — but those summaries do not directly break down removals by criminal conviction status to equate removals with criminal deportations [6]. Independent analyses and internal ICE custody snapshots indicate that the vast growth in removals largely reflected operational adjustments — increased charter flights, streamlined travel procedures, and border processing — rather than an unprecedented surge in interior criminal arrests [5] [6].
3. Who in ICE custody had convictions? The surprising share without convictions
Newer ICE custody data showed that 65% of people taken into custody had no criminal convictions and 93% had no violent convictions, signaling that most individuals detained by ICE were not convicted criminals, and most deportations did not target violent offenders [3]. This suggests a disconnect between public claims of mass deportations of criminals and the actual composition of those detained: large-scale removals in 2024 were not primarily removals of people with felony or violent convictions, which reshapes the narrative around “criminal deportations” in ICE statistics [3].
4. Conflicting analyses: some evidence of increased enforcement, some of stability
While ICE’s aggregate removal counts rose sharply in FY2024, watchdog and academic evaluations found little empirical evidence of a proportional uptick in interior arrests and removals compared to prior periods, and some short-term metrics even showed decreases in certain intervals (for example, a reported 6.5% decline in removals over a particular 14-day span) — a complexity that points to different metrics and timeframes producing divergent impressions [4] [6]. The upshot is that headlines citing high total deportations can conflate border removals and ICE interior enforcement, producing misleading comparisons if not disaggregated by apprehension source and criminal history.
5. Recruitment drives and policy signals matter but don’t equal immediate deportation of criminals
Recent reporting on aggressive ICE recruitment campaigns and large proposed budgets for hiring deportation officers — including multi-billion-dollar initiatives and ad blitzes aimed at expanding capacity — signal an intent to expand enforcement footprint, but those recruitment efforts do not provide direct evidence of 2024 criminal deportation counts, and the timing means expanded capacity may influence future years more than FY2024 statistics [7] [8]. Policymakers and advocates on both sides can use recruitment narratives to advance agendas: proponents cite capacity to remove dangerous criminals, while opponents warn of mass interior enforcement affecting non-criminal migrants.
6. Putting the pieces together: what the data actually show in 2024
Combining ICE’s FY2024 totals, the CBP share of deportations, ICE custody conviction breakdowns, and independent reviews produces a clear pattern: overall deportations rose to a decade high in 2024, but most of that rise was driven by border removals, and the majority of people taken into ICE custody lacked criminal convictions [1] [2] [3]. Therefore, criminal deportations did not proportionally account for the surge; public understanding should distinguish between total removals and removals of people with criminal convictions to avoid conflating separate enforcement activities [3] [5].
7. What remains unclear and what to watch next
Key gaps remain: ICE’s public releases and media summaries often lack a consistent, detailed breakdown linking removals to criminal conviction categories across the entire fiscal year, and recruitment and budget expansions reported in 2025 suggest possible future shifts in interior enforcement patterns [6] [7]. Observers should monitor future ICE quarterly and FY reports for explicit conviction-status tables, and track how newly hired officers are deployed, because aggregate deportation totals alone will continue to obscure whether increases reflect border processing, interior criminal arrests, or administrative removals [6] [8].