by Andrew Arthur
AFebruary 9 CBS News story is headlined “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows”. That claim has had such an impact that it made its way across Twitter into a House DHS oversight hearing. But it’s just the latest iteration of a common trope that reveals such a deep misunderstanding of immigration law that it’s either part of a coordinated effort to undermine ICE enforcement efforts or the latest example of the deleterious impacts of tendentious herd mentality.
“A Little More Light and a Little Less Noise”
If the current president has anything besides political affiliation in common with Abraham Lincoln, it’s their shared mistreatment by the press.
Most history books fail to mention that the 16th president was regularly ridiculed and derided by the “Fourth Estate”, and Lincoln — like Trump — often gave as good as he got.
Here’s one anecdote from the White House Historical Association website:
Lincoln sarcastically likened newspapermen to a story he told of a man lost in the forest at night during a thunderstorm. The man dropped to his knees, “O Lord, if it is all the same to you, give us a little more light and a little less noise!” Lincoln wished the same from the press.
For all the “noise” in the media over immigration enforcement, ICE officers are doing what Congress told them to do in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Let me explain the rules and what such analyses have left out, accidentally or deliberately.
Mandatory Detention
For decades, Congress in sections 235(b) and 236(c) of the INA has barred DHS from releasing certain aliens, including inadmissible aliens stopped at the ports, illegal entrants, and most aliens removable on criminal grounds.
Congress added to that “mandatory detention” list last January, when it passed the Laken Riley Act (LRA).
Under section 2(1)(E) of the LRA, DHS is required to detain — and not release — any illegal entrant who:
is charged with, is arrested for, is convicted of, admits having committed, or admits committing acts which constitute the essential elements of any burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, or assault of a law enforcement officer offense, or any crime that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person.
In addition, under section 241(a)(2) of the INA, DHS must detain all aliens who have received their due process rights and who nonetheless are under final orders of removal and to hold them for at least 90 days (the “removal period”) or until they are deported from the United States.
“Under no circumstance during the removal period”, section 241(a)(2) continues, “shall [DHS] release an alien who has been found” removable on criminal grounds in sections 212(a)(2) or 237(a)(2) of the INA or who has committed offenses listed in the LRA, and in section 3(e) of that act, Congress authorized state attorneys general to sue DHS in federal court to ensure it complies with those detention mandates.
“Less than 14% of those Arrested by ICE” under Trump II “Had Violent Criminal Records”
Which brings me to the February 9 CBS News article claiming that “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records”.
CBS News claims that “internal DHS figures undermine frequent assertions by the Trump administration that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally”, offering the following examples to support its contentions:
[T]he internal data indicate that less than 2% of those arrested by ICE over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions. Another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.
Nearly 40% of all of those arrested by ICE in Mr. Trump's first year back in office did not have any criminal record at all, and were only accused of civil immigration offenses, such as living in the U.S. illegally or overstaying their permission to be in the country, the DHS document shows.
The document lists 2,100 arrests of those with homicide charges or convictions; 2,700 arrests of those with robbery offenses; and 5,400 arrests involving individuals charged with or convicted of sexual assault. Another 43,000 arrestees are listed as having assault charges or convictions. About 1,100 had kidnapping charges or convictions and 350 had arson offenses listed.
Added together, the number of ICE arrests involving individuals charged with or convicted of the aforementioned violent crimes represents around 13.9% of all arrests.
Dissecting the CBS News Analysis
What CBS News fails to explain in that article is much more important than what it presents, not only because it omits key points, but more importantly because those omissions explain why ICE took so many “non-violent criminal aliens” into custody over the past year.
To begin, the outlet explains that DHS made 392,619 arrests between January 20, 2025, and January 31, 2026, a figure that I’ll assume is accurate for purposes of my analysis.
I will also assume CBS News accurately reported that .3 percent of those arrests involved aliens accused or convicted of kidnapping, .5 percent with charges or convictions for homicide, .7 percent for robbery, 1.3 percent for burglary, 1.4 percent for sexual assaults, 1.6 percent for weapons offenses, 5.7 percent for “dangerous drugs”, 7.6 percent for DUI, and 10.9 percent for assault.
Do the math, and 30 percent of all ICE arrests during that Trump II period involved aliens with criminal histories for kidnapping, homicide, robbery, burglary, sexual assault, weapons offenses, dangerous drugs, DUI, and assault — by my calculations, 117,785 arrests in total, or 2.5 times as many as all ICE arrests of aliens with “criminal histories” in FY 2022 (46,396), 59 percent more than in FY 2023 (73,822), and 45 percent more than in FY 2024 (81,312) — all during the Biden administration.
In other words, ICE today is arresting way more criminals than it did under the last administration.
One reason why ICE officers arrested so many aliens with criminal histories during the first year-plus of Trump II is that Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, had throttled officers’ ability to arrest removable aliens with criminal histories, leaving tens of thousands of them on the street for “Border Czar” Tom Homan to go after once he arrived.
That’s not a supposition, it’s verifiable truth; and in fact the Biden administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court (in U.S. v. Texas, where it “won”, in July 2023) to preserve DHS’s prerogative to not take more dangerous criminal aliens into immigration custody.
The Laken Riley Act
Leaving aside the fact that in an act of senseless paternalism, Mayorkas all-but banned ICE from going after domestic abusers, the then-secretary’s non-enforcement policies and the Court’s opinion in Texas were driving forces behind Congress’s passage of the Laken Riley Act.
As noted, the LRA not only required ICE to arrest criminal aliens Mayorkas had allowed to remain free to commit new crimes (like the murder of Ms. Riley), but it also expanded the class of criminal aliens ICE was required to arrest and detain to include those “charged with, arrested for, [and] convicted of” three non-violent crimes: theft, larceny, and shoplifting.
Shoplifting is one of the most common crimes in America: There were more than 1.15 million reported instances alone in 2023, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of other larceny and theft-related offenses.
If only a fraction of those shoplifting, theft, and larceny cases involved illegal aliens, it necessarily would boost the number of “non-violent criminal aliens” ICE is required by law to arrest by tens of thousands annually.
The author of the CBS News article is well aware of the LRA; he contributed to a January 9, 2025, update on the bill, which included the following:
Under current law, the Department of Homeland Security is mandated to detain noncitizens convicted of certain crimes, including "aggravated felonies," or serious offenses like murder and sexual assault. The Laken Riley Act would expand mandatory detention to include noncitizens convicted of or charged with burglary, larceny, theft or shoplifting, as well as those who admit to committing those crimes. [Emphasis added.]
Why, then, did he fail to even mention the impact of the Laken Riley Act when pillorying ICE for the rise in “non-violent criminal alien” arrests following the passage of that bill? I’ll chalk it up to simple oversight but leave it to you to form your own opinions.
Arrests and Detentions During the “Removal Period”
CBS News also failed to mention mandates in section 241(a)(2) of the INA requiring ICE to take custody of all aliens under final removal orders, and to detain those ordered removed on criminal grounds — including for non-violent convictions — as well as shoplifters, thieves, and larcenists added by the LRA.
Having been both an INS prosecutor and an immigration judge, I can assure you most aliens with final orders don’t have a criminal history but again the law nevertheless requires ICE to arrest and remove them.
That fact is rarely if ever mentioned in media analyses comlaining about how many “non-criminal” aliens the agency is taking into its custody, which is puzzling because the law is straightforward.
Keep in mind that Mayorkas left Homan more than 1.44 million aliens with unexecuted final orders. If due process means anything, it should require aliens who have had their day in court and been ordered removed to leave — whether they have “violent criminal records” or not. CBS News should not blame ICE for forcing them to do so.
What About Biden?
Finally, CBS News strangely omitted key historical context from its “violent criminal records” report.
Under the Biden administration in FY 2023, just 43 percent of ICE interior arrests involved aliens with any criminal history — let alone arrests or convictions for “violent” crimes (an undefined and subjective term CBS News nonetheless persisted in peddling).
That was actually an increase compared to FY 2022 (also under Biden), when nearly three-quarters (67.5 percent) of ICE interior arrests involved non-criminal “other immigration violators”.
CBS News notes that “The percentage of ICE arrests of those with criminal histories ... went down, from 72% in fiscal year 2024, to nearly 60% in Mr. Trump's first year”, but somehow omits the fact that FY 2024 was an outlier compared to earlier ICE arrest figures under Biden, or that the Trump II ICE is focusing more closely on criminals than the agency had in the first two full fiscal years of the last administration.
In failing to even mention those FY 2022 and FY 2023 ICE arrest figures, CBS News leaves the erroneous impression that ICE’s Trump II arrest efforts are somehow outside the norm. In reality, the percentage of current ICE criminal arrests is closer to historical averages than they were in FY 2024.
Key Takeaways
The INA, as amended by the Laken Riley Act, requires ICE to arrest large numbers of aliens, including many without criminal records or whose crimes aren’t “violent”. Tendentious reporting won’t change that fact, but it can mislead readers. It’s time for the press to listen to Lincoln and give the public “a little more light and a little less noise” — and better historical context — on immigration enforcement.
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