(NEW YORK) — Only 3% of individuals detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first 14 months of the second Trump administration had a violent felony conviction, according to an ABC News analysis of government data.
The findings, based on data tracking the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, come after President Donald Trump had pledged to target the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders among the nation’s migrants.
Based on government data analyzed by ABC News as provided by ICE in response to a FOIA requests to the Deportation Data Project and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, the findings show that immigration enforcement has affected more than 400,000 individuals with no violent criminal history, including parents and spouses of U.S. citizens.
While the 3% figure is consistent with rates seen under the Biden administration, the data shows the Trump administration is not detaining a higher proportion of violent offenders despite a significant overall increase in total detentions.
‘President Trump’s promise’
Under Trump, there has been record high detention population, currently at around 60,000 in federal immigration custody. The most detainees under the previous administration was 39,748 in November 2023, according to a nonprofit data gathering group.
According to the government data, of the 438,537 people detained between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, 13,018 had a violent felony conviction in the United States. The analysis defined “violent felony” as homicide, sexual assault, robbery, or assault.
The data also showed that in the first eight months of 2025, ICE apprehended the parents of approximately 14,450 U.S.-born children. This eight-month figure nearly surpassed the total for all of 2024 and surpassed the yearly totals for both 2022 and 2023.
Of those apprehended during the administration’s first seven months, more than 9,700 children saw at least one parent placed into immigration detention — more than in previous years. Of those detained, parents of more than 7,000 children were eventually deported. Of the more than 4,700 deported parents, 265 had a violent felony conviction. And of the more than 6,400 detained parents, 322 had a violent felony conviction.
In a statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, “Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. This data is being cherry picked by the Deportation Data Project to peddle a false narrative.”
The Deportation Data Project provides minimally processed and unprocessed data supplied to them directly by ICE via FOIA.
“Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are criminal illegal aliens,” the statement went on to say. “We are continuing to go after the worst of the worst — including gang members, pedophiles, and rapists. Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
“Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally,” the statement said regarding charges of unlawful entry, which is generally a civil violation, not a criminal offense.
‘Economic consequences’
Andrea Flores, the founder of Securing America’s Promise and a former Department of Homeland Security official, said the policy of mass deportation could lead to a child welfare crisis.
“So many children are losing primary caretakers or going to guardians,” Flores said in a Zoom interview. “We are going to have a class of children who lose their parents under this administration that is bigger than we probably have seen in modern history.”
DHS said in a statement that ICE does not separate families and that “parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
In the first eight months of 2025, ICE also apprehended 4,843 spouses of U.S. citizens. During the first seven months of the term, more than 2,000 of these spouses were deported. Of the more than 2,000 spouses of U.S. citizens deported during the first seven months of the term, 165 had a violent felony conviction.
“We cannot underplay what it means to have even just a spouse go to detention, because what if they are the primary earner in that household?” Flores said. “We’re talking about economic consequences. We’re talking about the emotional costs of not having access to that family member.”
Trump administration officials have said that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally, but they have also maintained that anyone residing in the country without legal status is subject to removal.
Methodology
ABC News analyzed enforcement trends by merging two primary sources: data provided by ICE via FOIA requests to the Deportation Data Project and ICE data provided to the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. The data provided to the Deportation Data Project includes data from the Department of Homeland Security’s PERSIST database, which shows the full lifecycle of immigration cases from January 2022 through early March 2026.
The data provided to the University of Washington Center for Human Rights includes I-213 records, which are the documents created when immigration officers arrest a noncitizen. These records span from January 2022 through late August 2025.
Publicly available data from ICE and DHS show detention populations and numbers on removals.
Statistics regarding the total number of parents and spouses apprehended were calculated using the University of Washington dataset alone. To determine how many of those individuals were specifically detained or deported, ABC News matched records across both databases using unique identifiers such as the date of arrest, gender, country of citizenship, and birth year.
The analysis focused on a subset of the data where a definitive match could be made between the two sources. The merged dataset allowed ABC News to track the progression of individual cases from the initial arrest through federal custody to identify parents and spouses who were ultimately held in facilities or removed from the country.
ABC News’ estimates for the number of U.S. citizens who had a parent or spouse arrested, detained and deported are likely an undercount. ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, first reported similar data in March.
ABC News’ analysis of U.S. citizens who had a parent or spouse detained is limited to only individuals for whom arresting agents wrote an I-213 report, which represents the vast majority of individuals arrested by ICE, but is not everyone who has been detained. To perform the analysis, any possible duplicates in the data were not counted.
Flores said these numbers will likely grow.
“We have seen some recent reporting as well that the numbers are going into the tens of thousands in terms of children who have been impacted by a detained parent,” Flores said. “There are 4 million U.S. citizen children in current estimates who have a parent that isn’t documented.”
ABC News’ Ryann Jones and Armando Garcia contributed to this report.
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