What percentage of people detained by ICE are undocumented?
Executive summary
The public record assembled here does not contain a single, authoritative percentage that answers “what share of people detained by ICE are undocumented,” and agency dashboards and reporting frame detainees as “aliens” rather than offering a citizenship-status breakdown that cleanly equates to “undocumented” [1] [2]. Available sources do show that the detained population is large and overwhelmingly composed of non‑U.S. nationals — with substantial disagreement about how many lack criminal convictions versus those the government labels criminal — but none of the provided documents supplies a definitive percent of detainees who are undocumented [3] [4] [5].
1. What the official data actually publishes: “aliens,” detention totals and categories
ICE’s public statistics present detention counts, country-of-citizenship tables, and categories such as “individuals with criminal convictions,” “pending charges,” and “other immigration violators,” but do not publish a simple “percent undocumented” figure in the material provided here; ICE repeatedly uses the term “aliens” and breakdowns focused on criminal history rather than lawful status labels like “undocumented” [1] [2]. The agency’s dashboards and management pages document total detained populations — for example, multiple trackers reported tens of thousands in custody at recent points (about 59,762; 65,735; 68,990 appear in reporting and analyses) — but these raw totals are not translated in the cited sources into a percent that is unambiguously “undocumented” [6] [7] [3].
2. How journalists and researchers try to approximate the answer
Independent analyses and news outlets have approached the question indirectly by measuring criminal history or origin of arrest: Reuters reported that roughly 41% of about 54,000 people arrested and detained by late November had no criminal record beyond an immigration violation, signaling that many detainees are recent border crossers or non‑criminal immigration cases rather than people apprehended for violent crime [4]. Other analyses argue an even larger share of detainees lack criminal convictions — the Brennan Center and Cato summaries cited around 65 percent with no criminal record in certain periods — but those estimates speak to criminal history, not documented legal status per se [5].
3. Competing official and political claims muddy a direct count
Department of Homeland Security spokespeople and administration officials have pushed alternative framings — for example, a DHS spokeswoman asserted that “70% of undocumented immigrants ICE arrested across the US have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” a claim that addresses the subset of arrested people identified as “undocumented” but does not produce a denominator for “all people detained by ICE” in the sources provided [8]. That statement stands alongside reporting and NGO analysis showing rapid growth in detentions of people without criminal records, which complicates efforts to convert mixed datasets into a single percentage [3] [9].
4. Limits of the evidence and the cautious conclusion
None of the supplied sources gives a direct, verifiable percentage of ICE detainees who are “undocumented” in the strict sense (i.e., noncitizens without lawful status), and ICE’s public materials emphasize citizenship and conviction categories rather than a simple documented/undocumented split, so any specific percentage would require additional FOIA-level data or a follow-up query to ICE’s statistics team [1] [2]. What can be asserted from the evidence is that the detained population is predominantly noncitizen, includes many recent border crossers and people without criminal convictions, and that analysts and officials disagree on how to characterize the composition and intent of enforcement efforts [3] [4] [5].
5. Why this ambiguity matters
The absence of a straightforward “percent undocumented” metric in the cited record matters because public debate pivots on whether ICE is targeting high‑risk criminals or broadly detaining people for immigration status alone; the data presented here instead highlights the scale of detention, the share without criminal convictions by several measures, and conflicting official claims — evidence that clarifying the undocumented share would materially affect policy and public perception but will require more granular release or synthesis of ICE’s underlying citizenship-status data [3] [4] [5].