U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is primarily targeting immigrants with no criminal record in Texas arrests, according to recent data released by the Deportation Data Project.
According to a data set released in March by professors at the UC Berkeley School of Law, the agency’s arrests of people who only have immigration-related offenses have far exceeded the number of those with pending criminal charges and convictions since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Initially, White House officials claimed the president’s aggressive immigration sweeps were only targeting the “worst of the worst,” and the data seemed to reflect that objective — at least at first.
The Deportation Data Project shows that from February to May 2025, ICE agents arrested more than twice the number of immigrants with criminal convictions than non-criminal immigrants during the early months of the Trump administration. Arrests of immigrants with pending charges during that four-month period also outpaced those of non-criminal immigrants.
Then in June 2025, everything shifted, according to the analysis. Arrests of non-criminal immigrants far outpaced arrests of people with pending charges or convictions. By December of that same year, ICE had arrested twice as many individuals in Texas without criminal charges or convictions as it did convicted criminals.
Statistics from the Deportation Data Project, which collects immigration arrest and detention data through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that from February 2025 to February 2026, ICE agents arrested more than 38,100 immigrants in Texas who didn’t have criminal convictions or pending charges. Meanwhile, the agency made 30,670 arrests of people with criminal convictions and about 22,720 with pending charges.
Data also show that Texas is the state with the highest number of ICE arrests by far. During 2025, a reported 24% of all national ICE arrests took place in the state.
The number of arrests also doubled in Texas between February 2025 and February 2026, primarily driven by an uptick in arrests of immigrants with no pending charges or convictions.
Monthly arrests in Texas peaked in December 2025 at 11,220 as the agency appeared to shoot for year-end quotas, which were widely publicized in the media.
According to a January report in the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration tasked ICE with a daily quota of 3,000 arrests nationwide to achieve an objective of 1 million arrests for all of 2025.
Instead, the agency fell short of its annual goal, recording approximately 393,000 arrests nationwide.
The Department of Homeland Security disputed the Deportation Data Project’s recently released figures in a report by the Houston Chronicle.
“This data is being cherry picked by the Deportation Data Project to peddle a false narrative. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are criminal illegal aliens,” an unnamed spokesperson at the DHS told the Chronicle. “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.,” the unnamed spokesperson continued. “Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
