How many ICE street-side arrests were recorded in major U.S. cities in 2025–2026, by conviction status?
Executive summary
Public reporting and newly released ICE/deportation datasets show a sharp rise in street-level interior arrests in 2025–early 2026, but the sources do not provide a complete, harmonized city-by-city tally broken down by conviction status; available local analyses show wide variation — in Dallas, journalists report the majority of arrestees lacked criminal convictions (62%) while federal spokespeople insist most arrests nationwide involve people with convictions or pending charges (70%) [1] [2]. The Deportation Data Project and ICE’s own partial releases cover arrests through mid‑October 2025 and are the primary bases for local and national snapshots, but they do not, in the published reporting provided here, produce a single authoritative table of “major U.S. cities” by conviction status [3] [4].
1. Dallas: headline numbers and conflicting framings
Reporting from The Dallas Morning News and local outlets documents a dramatic spike in Dallas-area ICE arrests in 2025 — about 12,000 arrests in roughly ten months — and finds that roughly 62% of those arrested by the Dallas field office had no prior criminal conviction, a finding amplified by NBC Dallas-Fort Worth’s coverage [1]; separately, the News’s analysis also highlights that arrests of people without prior criminal convictions rose from under 500 in 2024 to over 2,400 in 2025 in some comparisons, illustrating how different metrics and timeframes inside a single jurisdiction can yield different headline numbers [5].
2. State and city snapshots: trends, not a census
State-level and city-specific reporting shows the same pattern: arrests rose, while the share with criminal convictions fell — for example, Colorado reporting shows most people arrested by ICE in 2025 in that state did not have a criminal conviction, with 26% having pending charges and 36% arrested on immigration violations without a criminal record [6]. Prison Policy’s analysis of Deportation Data Project files through mid‑October 2025 similarly documents variation across jurisdictions — New Jersey had a large share with pending charges while New York had a much smaller share — underscoring that conviction-status mixes differ sharply from city to city [7] [3].
3. National claims versus local data: competing narratives
The Biden-era Department of Homeland Security and ICE officials pushed a counter-narrative that enforcement targets the “worst of the worst,” with a DHS spokeswoman asserting that 70% of people ICE arrested nationwide had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges [2]. That national claim sits in tension with local journalism and the Deportation Data Project data that show numerous major-city sweeps and “at‑large” arrests returning large percentages of people without criminal convictions in particular places [7] [3].
4. Why precise city-by-city counts are elusive
The primary public datasets are partial, patched and released on differing schedules: ICE’s own statistics are structured by citizenship and broad criminal‑history categories but the public releases through mid‑October 2025 do not provide a simple, up‑to‑date matrix of “street‑side arrests in major U.S. cities in 2025–2026, by conviction status” in the public reporting examined here [4] [3]. Local newsrooms used FOIA-backed Deportation Data Project extracts and arrests tied to specific field offices to compute city/region totals, which explains divergence in totals and why a single definitive national city-by-city breakdown is not present in the available sources [5] [1].
5. Reading the numbers and the agendas behind them
Numbers are doing political work: federal press releases and DHS briefings emphasize convictions and violent offenders to justify aggressive operations and new hiring and funding, while investigative reporting and advocacy groups emphasize the growth in arrests of people without convictions — sometimes framing it as mass interior enforcement or a rights issue — and highlight harms such as rising detention populations and deaths in custody [8] [9] [7]. Both framings are supported by elements of the available data but neither produces an exhaustive, comparable list of major cities with arrests-by-conviction-status for the full 2025–2026 period in the sources provided [3] [4].
6. Bottom line for the question asked
There is not a single, validated public table in the reporting provided here that lists every major U.S. city’s street‑side ICE arrests in 2025–2026 broken down by conviction status; instead, the evidence is patchwork: Dallas’s field office reported roughly 12,000 arrests in ten months with local analysis finding about 62% had no prior convictions [1], Colorado reporting shows most local arrestees lacked convictions [6], and national statements from DHS claim 70% of arrests nationwide had convictions or pending charges [2]. The Deportation Data Project and ICE’s own releases are the source materials on which these divergent city and national figures rest, but the available public reporting does not let this review produce a comprehensive, city‑by‑city numeric answer for all major U.S. cities for 2025–2026 [3] [4].