ICE Arrests Smaller Share of People with Criminal Record

Last night a tentative deal between Congress and the President was announced to avoid another partial government shutdown. The agreement will provide $1.4 billion for border fencing and cut back on funding for ICE detention beds.

While the total number of administrative arrests made by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has gone up in absolute terms, the share of those arrests that are criminal has gone down. In FY2016, 86 percent of the over 110,000 arrests ICE made were of undocumented migrants, who were convicted of crimes. By FY2017, while the total number of undocumented migrants arrested went up to 143,470 only about three-quarters of those arrests were of people with a criminal record. For the fiscal year 2018, the share of undocumented migrants with a previous criminal record dropped to just two-thirds of total detentions.