How many illegal criminal aliens have been arrested since Trumps administration

1. Official tallies: different agencies, different framings, different totals

Federal statements from the Department of Homeland Security and the White House present large totals—phrases like “hundreds of thousands” and “over 150,000” arrested are used in DHS and White House releases to summarize enforcement since January 2025, and a DHS page invites the public to search a “Worst of the Worst” database of arrests ^{[3] [7] [2]}. ICE’s own operational release, however, provides more conservative, time-bound counts: ICE reported 66,463 arrests in the agency’s first 100 days of the administration and said 75 percent of those were “criminal illegal aliens,” a narrower snapshot that does not equal a multi-year total ^[1].

2. Press and investigative totals: media analyses broaden the picture but use different metrics

Major news analyses offer larger cumulative numbers but mix categories—The New York Times reported about 230,000 people deported after interior arrests and another 270,000 at the border in the administration’s first year, producing a combined removals figure of roughly 540,000 when additional programs are counted, a figure that reflects removals rather than a simple count of “criminal” arrests ^[4]. Reuters and the BBC documented surges in enforcement activity and daily arrest reporting early on, but those contemporaneous counts covered short intervals and varied by whether they counted ICE interior arrests, Border Patrol encounters, or expulsions at the border ^{[8] [9]}.

3. What “criminal” means—and why percentages matter

Agencies have repeatedly labeled many arrestees “criminal illegal aliens,” yet oversight reporting finds that the proportion of ICE arrestees with U.S. criminal convictions declined substantially over time: FactCheck reports convicted criminals accounted for 44.7% of ICE arrests in the initial months but fell to 31.8% in a later three‑month period, and other watchdogs documented big increases in arrests of people with no U.S. criminal record ^{[5] [10]}. That shift matters because political messaging often equates all arrests with removal of violent criminals, while official statistics and independent analyses show a mix that includes non‑criminal civil immigration cases and expedited border expulsions ^{[5] [6]}.

4. Bottom line: a precise number is not supportable from the available sources

The sources provided collectively establish that enforcement under President Trump grew to thousands-per-day at peak moments and that total interior arrests and removals in the first year run into the hundreds of thousands by some measures ^{[1] [4] [3]}. They do not, however, converge on a single verified count of “illegal criminal aliens arrested since Trump’s administration” because agencies use different timeframes, conflate arrests and removals, and vary in how they classify “criminal” status; independent reporting shows the share with convictions declined even as arrest totals rose ^{[1] [4] [5]}. Therefore, the most responsible summary is: official claims range from tens of thousands in discrete intervals (e.g., ICE’s 66,463 arrests in the first 100 days) to administrationwide statements of 150,000+ or “hundreds of thousands,” while journalistic analyses of removals document interior deportations in the hundreds of thousands—none of these sources provides an uncontested, single figure specifically for “illegal criminal aliens arrested” that can be cited as definitive ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}.