U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carry out an arrest as part of a nationwide enforcement sweep. Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

More than half of the undocumented migrants detained in San Antonio by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since President Donald Trump began his second term had no prior criminal charges or convictions, according to numbers released this week by the Deportation Data Project.

Of the 1804 recorded ICE arrests in San Antonio since January, 916 of those — or 51% — involved people who had no criminal charges or convictions. Meanwhile, 31% had at least one conviction and 18% had at least one charge and no conviction, the data show.

The Deportation Data Project, a project of researchers at the University of California Berkeley, collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration data sets and other statistics gathered freedom-of-information requests.

President Trump campaigned on a vow to arrest and deport the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders living illegally inside the United States, including murderers, rapists and sex traffickers. However, review of the latest ICE arrest data by the Associated Press indicates that as of June 29, nearly 72% of people by ICE nationwide had no criminal convictions.

Despite the data, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has made comments to the media that more than 70% of those arrested by ICE are “illegal aliens with criminal convictions or have pending criminal charges,” according to CBS.

The new figures also as Trump has demanded that ICE ramp up deportations to meet a 3,000 per day quota, which has led some watchdog groups to accuse the federal agency of racial profiling. Indeed, the number of monthly ICE arrests since Trump’s second inauguration has skyrocketed by nearly 40%.

“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice told the Associated Press earlier this month. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”

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This article appears in Jul 10-23, 2025.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...