Jorge Soto came to a Texas ICE office in January as part of a routine review — complying when requested to also bring his wife and two children, ages 4 and 5, from school. After learning that his wife Beatriz Piño and two children had been in Texas just under the two year threshold that would have provided further legal protection, immigration attorney Jonathan E. Shaw told Deseret News how agents put this woman and her two children on an airplane to leave the country without the father, Jorge, even being aware.
The day before the presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump described at a Pennsylvania rally his intent to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in American history.” Soon after the election, the President-elect also emphasized his specific aim to “get the criminals out” in expanded deportation proceedings.
As these plans have been put in action, it’s remained unclear how many criminals are being targeted as part of these deportation efforts — compared with law-abiding individuals who are noncitizens.
Even El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to receive U.S. deportees in his prisons, reportedly requested more reassurance from the United States that each of those locked up in the prison were, in fact, gang members.
Earlier this spring, New York Times journalists reached out to all 88 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices asking for more details on who was getting deported.
At this early date, government offices refused to release details of deportees as a whole. In recent months, they’ve released many stories on social media of certain individuals who committed heinous crimes.
It’s clear that most Americans welcome news about convicted criminals being deported — with 97% of respondents in a March 2025 Pew survey saying they support the removal from the United States of those who have committed violent crimes, with a slight majority (52%) supporting deportations for nonviolent crimes.
That number drops to 15% and 14% when asked about deporting noncitizens with jobs or those with children born in the U.S.
Border “czar” Tom Homan has long acknowledged “collateral arrests” as part of the expected result when ICE-raids target known criminals. So, how often is that happening? How many other migrants without a criminal background are being arrested and deported?
As time has passed, more statistics have emerged on this question. NBC News reported in February about government data they obtained showing that “the number of detainees in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody without a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges increased by more than 1,800 in the first two weeks of February, representing 41% of the 4,422 total new detainees in that period” (with 59% having some criminal association).
One month later in March, the Department of Homeland Security shared higher percentages, claiming that in Trump’s first 50 days, out of the 32,809 arrests made of undocumented people in the country, just over 73% were “accused or convicted criminals.”
More recently, the State Department reported revoking an estimated 4,000 student visas in the first 100 days of President Trump’s office. According to a senior State Department official who spoke with the New York Post, 90% of them have serious criminal records.
The latest numbers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — including stats through April - show that of the 49,184 individuals detained in 2025, 31% are convicted of a crime and another 24% have pending criminal charges (totaling 55% with some kind of criminal association).
That figure of just over half of those arrested having criminal records seems to be the most reliable figure based on the most comprehensive data so far. Historically, the comparable figures of arrested noncitizens who had confirmed or pending criminal charges was 72% in 2024 and 43% in 2023, according to a 2024 report by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As reflected here, although the percentage of non-criminally charged individuals being deported has risen in recent months compared with the previous year, the current figure of 45% is less than the estimated 57% of those arrested in 2023 during the Biden administration by U.S. Enforcement and Removal Operations without criminal backgrounds.
Removing as fast as possible
One reason the government needed to gather further evidence to send to President Bukele, is that the planned process moved faster than such careful evidence gathering would require, thanks to invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. As Stephen Miller explained to Charlie Kirk in a September 2023 interview, that act would allow the government to “instantaneously remove” any noncitizen foreigner 14 years or older from somewhere determined to be an “invading country.”
“That allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding,” Miller explained.
In recent weeks, multiple judges (most recently the Supreme Court on Friday) have ruled against this invocation of the 18th century law, arguing the White House hasn’t shown the United States is under invasion by a hostile foreign power.
Subsequently, Stephen Miller confirmed last week the administration was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, a legal principle that protects individuals from unlawful detention by requiring that person to be brought before a court to confirm that detention is lawful. (Presumably, the administration would again be arguing for an invasion threat, since the Constitution stipulates, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.“)
‘Why is he being treated like a criminal?’
“If the people who are getting arrested are really the cold-blooded criminals the executive branch insists they are,” writes columnist David Graham in the Atlantic, “saying so in a court of law should be relatively easy.”
But in recent weeks, more stories have been published of individuals detained by ICE without any redress, accompanied by protests from families who insist they are law-abiding and contributing positively to their community. For instance, in early February ICE agents seized Neri José Alvarado a few days before his asylum appointment was scheduled. The 25-year-old man had fled Venezuela and had just got a promotion at a bakery in the Dallas area, reportedly sending money home to cover his brother’s treatments for autism.
Alvarado is now in El Salvador’s prison. Bakery owner Enrique Hernández told reporters: “They didn’t investigate him…They took him and they didn’t even know who he was.”
In March, a 20-year old man Cristian, likewise from Venezuela in the U.S. with a pending asylum application, was also sent to prison in El Salvador. The judge, a Trump appointee, who later reviewed the decision, wrote critically: “Defendants have provided no evidence, or even any specific allegations, as to how Cristian, or any other Class Member, poses a threat to public safety.”
A third man, 25-year-old Guatemalan with no prior police or criminal record, according to his family, was detained in Massachusetts this month.
“It’s not fair that he’s going through this and being treated like a criminal,” said the young man’s father Arquimedes Orellana, who says he brought his family to the U.S. fleeing violence in his home country.
Daniel Orellana has since been in contact with his girlfriend, Zulema Alfaro, telling her it was a “misunderstanding” but that the officials told him, “OK, but we’re going to take you anyway.”
The father insisted he wasn’t against the government bringing more scrutiny to immigration status. “I know the government is working to improve the country… but it’s not fair that they take innocent people, people who are productive for the country.”
When asked in an April interview about whether he was worried about mistakenly deporting innocent people, President Trump responded, “You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that.” He then emphasized, “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that.”
President Trump then added, “And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
How serious a crime is triggering scrutiny?
When it comes to visas being revoked, government sources deny that mild charges like “littering” are triggering federal action, with one official claiming that 500 of the 3600 students whose visas were revoked had assaulted someone.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio does famously have a “zero tolerance” policy for students who, in his words, “create a ruckus for us” on campus — e.g., if they vandalize a library or “take over a campus.”
Sometimes minor violations are being cited as pretext for removal proceedings. For instance, Ximena Arias-Cristobal, 19, was arrested in Georgia after failing to obey a “no turn on red” sign. She’s lived in the U.S. for 15 years, graduating high school and starting college.
Her father, Jose Francisco Arias-Tovar, owns a small business — but was also pulled over for a speeding ticket. Now the whole family is facing deportation within a month — with immigration attorney Terry Olsen saying authorities shortly plan to arrest Arias-Cristobal’s mother and her daughters “to keep the family together.”
In some instances, vastly disparate allegations exist about deported families. For example, in one highly publicized case where a 2-year-old was separated from her parents, the U.S. government has accused father Maiker Espinoza of being a “lieutenant” of the gang Tren de Aragua who oversees criminal operations, and his wife, 20-year-old Yorely Bernal of directing the “recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution.”
But Mr. Espinoza’s sister, María Alejandra Fernández, 31, rejects these allegations, saying: “My brother is not a criminal. He left Venezuela like many young people, looking for an opportunity to get ahead.”
Referring to these kinds of cases, immigration researcher David Dyssegaard Kallick tells Deseret News: “This administration is trampling due process and picking people up off the streets and deciding that anyone they say has committed a crime is a criminal. And they’re doing that whether or not there’s evidence and whether or not the family even knows what’s happening.”
Kallick is the director of the Immigration Research Initiative, established to “inject some level of calm and data-based understanding” in a national debate dominated by what he calls “overheated rhetoric and unfounded claims about immigrants in everyday life.”
Kallick points out that due process was “so fundamental to our history in this country.” This principle was “absolutely front of mind for the framers of the Constitution, who had their own experiences with a monarch who didn’t respect due process and just decided that somebody who they suspected was a criminal was a criminal,” he says.
Not only criminals - anyone in the country illegally
Although publicly committing to prioritize the “worst first,” the White House has also acknowledged wanting to go beyond those with a criminal background.
The fact is that immigrants here illegally who have criminal records that go beyond immigration violations number only in the hundreds of thousands – far short of the millions this White House has committed to deport.
As I reported earlier this year, out of the total estimated population of migrants in the U.S., an estimated 5% (655,000) have some kind of a criminal charge or conviction, many of which are minor offenses like traffic violations. And of this group that has been charged with any violation of the law, only 15,000 are in custody, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
To reach higher deportation numbers, quotas are being used. When senior ICE officials were instructed to make 75 arrests per day at each of the agency’s field offices, the Washington Post reported current and former ICE officials acknowledging that “the orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics or face accusations of civil rights violations as they strain to meet quotas.”
Those with criminal records are also often the toughest people to track down and arrest — compared with law-abiding immigrants who seek to follow all the rules and keep records updated.
This is a cruel irony noted by several immigration attorneys Deseret News contacted. Namely, those who have tried to do the right thing —submitting papers, appearing in court, staying in touch with the immigration office — may be more vulnerable to deportation, because the government knows where they are (compared with those largely off the radar).
Writing in Forbes earlier in the year, Stuart Anderson had similarly predicted that federal pressure to generate large numbers of deportations would create conditions where “targeting criminals or convicting a business owner in a workplace raid will be secondary to the bureaucratic goal of driving up deportation numbers.”
Homan has acknowledged the possibility of reinstating the practice of detaining immigrant families. “We need family residential centers,” he said.
“My mom isn’t a criminal,” Ingrid Martínez said about her mother, who was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Nashville area this month. “My mom — she serves a church. She takes care of her grandkids. So, I don’t know how she can be seen as a criminal.”
“Despite legal status, we have contributed greatly to this city’s development,” said Martinez and Patricia Rocha, who have lived in Tennessee for more than 30 years and recently saw their sister apprehended. “Some people think immigrants are criminals, that we steal jobs. On the contrary, many of us are business owners who create jobs.”
Immigration attorney Jonathan E. Shaw tells Deseret News, “Now, it’s open season on anyone who’s been here less than 2 years.”