Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood in New York on September 1 and announced that a monthlong ICE operation had pulled more than 2,100 people off the streets, every one of them a criminal: gang members, rapists, murderers, the worst of the worst.
The government’s own records say otherwise. Federal detention data shows roughly 70% of the people ICE is holding have no criminal conviction of any kind, and independent analyses put violent convictions in the single digits.
Then, late last month, the administration gave the game away itself. ICE officers around the country were quietly told to stop arresting people without criminal records, a directive that makes no sense unless arresting people without criminal records is exactly what ICE spends its days doing. Within about a day of the order becoming public, the White House killed it.
Mullin has spent a month insisting ICE targets only the dangerous while his own department confirms, in writing, that no one is off the table. One of those two things is true, and the data says which.
The Leaked Order That Gave The Game Away
On September 26, The Daily Wire reported, citing multiple agency sources, that ICE officers nationwide had been told to stop arresting people without criminal convictions or pending charges. Collateral arrests, the people agents sweep up while looking for someone else, were reportedly off the menu too.
One officer told the outlet the pullback wasn’t about principle: “We believe it has something to do with the midterms coming up.”
DHS called the report false and posted that no one is off the table, vowing to keep arresting every person in the country illegally that its agents encounter. Then Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, hardly a hostile outlet’s reporter, confirmed the verbal guidance was real. Agents were furious about it, Melugin reported, and were later told the directive was an error, a miscommunication inside conversations about prioritizing the worst first.
Melugin added that Trump told him personally that nothing had changed and that anyone in the country illegally remains a target regardless of criminal history. Regardless of criminal history. That is the policy, stated plainly by the man running it.
The reversal fits an established pattern. Trump already killed an earlier ICE pause this year after cable news coverage made the pullback look weak on television. When enforcement optics collide with enforcement reality, the optics win.
What The Government’s Own Numbers Show
None of the real data is hidden. It sits in public databases and in documents the government itself produced.
The TRAC project at Syracuse University tracked 70% of roughly 60,000 people held in ICE detention this spring as having no criminal conviction at all. The Cato Institute’s David Bier ran government booking data last November and found 73% of ICE detainees had no criminal record, and only about 5% of the people booked into ICE custody in the opening weeks of fiscal year 2026 had ever been convicted of a violent crime.
CBS News obtained an internal DHS document in February showing fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 people ICE arrested in Trump’s first year back had charges or convictions for violent offenses. The same reporting found fewer than 2% had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions.
It’s trending worse, not better. The American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick says that since July, the majority of all ICE arrests have been people with no criminal record whatsoever.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal read those numbers straight to DHS at a House immigration subcommittee hearing in mid September, telling the department that for the first time, most of the people it arrested over the summer posed no threat to public safety, while arrests of people with actual convictions declined. Mullin went on Fox News that same weekend and disputed none of it. He promised ICE would keep arresting people regardless and insisted, “We do go after the worst of the worst every day.” Six days later, his agency’s quiet order to stand down on exactly those arrests leaked to the press.
How The 70% Talking Point Is Built
The administration’s favorite rebuttal is a single number. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin spent months claiming that roughly 70% of those arrested under this administration have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, and a December department release insisted most arrests involved people “charged or convicted of a crime” while offering no data behind the claim, as Straight Arrow News noted at the time.
The trick is in the fine print. Pending charges are accusations, not findings of guilt, and Bier has pointed out that DHS routinely counts people with pending charges as criminal arrests even though they were never convicted, with charges that are often minor and regularly dismissed. The convictions themselves reach all the way down to traffic offenses.
Border czar Tom Homan took the inflation further, repeatedly claiming 70% of arrests were criminals and the remaining 30% were national security threats, a breakdown Media Matters documented him offering with nothing in the public record behind it. When the facts didn’t fit, he invented a category for the leftovers.
This is also the department that claimed thousands of noncitizen voters sat on Nevada’s rolls until the state checked and found zero. Numbers are props to this DHS, not findings.
Alligator Alcatraz Wrote The Playbook
The template was set in July 2025 in the Everglades. Trump opened the Florida detention camp his administration branded Alligator Alcatraz and described the people headed inside as “some of the most vicious people on the planet.” Sean Hannity sold it to Fox viewers as a detention camp for the worst of the worst.
Then the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times obtained a detainee list for the site and found that more than 250 of the roughly 700 people held there had no criminal conviction and no pending charges of any kind. Only about a third had ever been convicted of anything, and those convictions ran from serious crimes all the way down to traffic violations.
One detainee the papers described was a Nicaraguan man in his fifties with a pending asylum case who landed in the camp after a traffic stop. PolitiFact measured the worst of the worst branding against the records and found it didn’t survive contact with them.
The department’s response was its own confession. McLaughlin told the papers that the people counted as having no records were actually terrorists, gangsters, and human rights abusers, “they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.” No conviction, no charge, no evidence. Just a label, applied by the people who got caught.
They Keep Detaining American Citizens
If the targeting were as surgical as advertised, the government wouldn’t keep sweeping up its own citizens. ProPublica identified more than 170 American citizens detained by immigration agents in the first nine months of the crackdown, including nearly 20 children, two of them with cancer. Some were held for days without access to a lawyer, and agents often ignored the proof of citizenship people put in their hands.
The federal government does not track how often this happens, which is its own kind of answer. Senate Democrats opened an investigation and documented nearly two dozen wrongly detained citizens themselves, directly contradicting the administration’s insistence that it only detains immigrants. Lawmakers, Roll Call reported, are now demanding DHS start counting.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker and a United States citizen, showed agents the Real ID his state issues only to citizens. They called it fake and handcuffed him. It has happened to him twice, and his wrongful detention lawsuit is still working through the courts.
The sloppiness scales all the way up. When the administration shipped more than 260 men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison and branded them terrorists, CBS News could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans on the flights after pulling court filings, arrest records, and the government’s own internal documents.
This is also the same machine that deported a cartel informant three times after he helped American authorities dismantle trafficking networks. Precision was never part of the design.
The Lie Is The Policy
Put the month in order. Mullin claims every one of 2,100 arrests was a criminal on September 1. Jayapal reads the government’s own contrary numbers into the record in mid September. Mullin repeats the slogan on Fox that weekend. Days later, his agency quietly orders a halt to exactly the arrests he says aren’t happening, one of his own officers ties the pullback to the midterms, and the White House reverses it in about a day while declaring that no one is off the table.
Nobody has to speculate about what ICE is doing anymore. The administration published the denial and confirmed the truth in the same weekend, and the man running the department kept lying through all of it.
The numbers that expose this sit in public databases, court filings, leaked internal documents, and the government’s own releases. Congress has them. Reporters have them. They will still be public in November. The only people pretending not to know them are the ones running the Department of Homeland Security, and pretending is a choice they make at a podium, on camera, every single week.
