Claims that DHS under Trump II isn’t really removing the “worst of the worst” are fast becoming a tedious meme, but a June 12 ABC News report takes the cake: “Just 3% of recent ICE detainees had a violent felony conviction, government data shows”. Please, spare me the faux outrage but if (as Barbie once claimed) “Math class is tough”, the following tutorial on what the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires — and the pernicious influence of sanctuary policies on ICE’s efforts to remove those criminals — will be even tougher.
“Trump Had Pledged to Target the ‘Worst of the Worst’ Criminal Offenders”
As if to hammer its headline home (and prove my point), here is the subheader on that ABC News report: “Trump had pledged to target the ‘worst of the worst’ criminal offenders”.
If you click on the link to that “worst of the worst” quote, however, you come to a different ABC News article from last July that begins, “President Donald Trump campaigned for president on the promise of mass deportations that targeted criminals” (emphasis added) — a much different claim, and one that’s more or less what the current administration has delivered.
Remember when Trump told a crowd in Conway, S.C., in February 2024 that if elected again, he’d “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”?
Simply put, mass deportations with an emphasis on criminals was what Donald Trump promised on the 2024 campaign trail, and what the Trump II White House highlights on its website, claiming its immigration enforcement scheme has led to lower rents, more jobs, and higher wages for American workers (both U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants).
Trump never claimed that his DHS was only going to arrest, detain, and deport aliens who had been convicted of “homicide, sexual assault, robbery, or assault” — the “violent felonies” as ABC News defined them — and taking them all off the streets would make communities safer, but wouldn’t lower rental prices or open new jobs for Americans.
By the way, I would have added burglary, kidnapping, abduction, arson, most domestic violence offenses, and a few others to the “felony” list, though to be fair to the network, those four offenses are the same ones the FBI and DOJ’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) define as “violent crimes”.
The Biden DHS Restrictions
One key point ABC News and most other critics omit when they make claims like this one, however, is that the law actually changed between the 2024 election (when Trump made his promises) and days after he reassumed command of the executive branch — and the reason it changed in the way that it did undermines the claims the outlet is making and explains what the administration is doing.
This is a point I’ve made at length elsewhere, so here is the Cliff’s Notes version: From day one of the Biden administration, the then-president and his soon-to-be DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deliberately limited the number of removable aliens — including “violent” ones — ICE could “take enforcement action” against (investigate, question, arrest, detain, prosecute, or remove).
Then, under “guidelines” Mayorkas issued in September 2021, ICE officers were forced to consider utterly irrelevant “mitigating factors” (including criminal aliens’ age and mental condition, the “military or other public service of” those criminal aliens “or their immediate family”, and the “time since an offense and evidence of rehabilitation”) before even opening an investigation.
Thus, if you were a 65-year-old paranoid schizophrenic with a kid working at the Post Office and a 20-year-old conviction for child molestation who had since begun working as a Little League coach, you were less likely to be considered a “priority” for removal, even though Congress unequivocally said in the INA you must leave.
U.S. v. Texas
Because DHS under Mayorkas refused to take custody of dangerous criminals released from their prisons and jails, the states of Texas and Louisiana sued the Biden administration, demanding that DHS arrest and detain those and other criminals.
Mayorkas and Biden’s DOJ, however, fought that suit all the way to the Supreme Court, where in June 2023, a majority of the justices held no one — not even the states — had “standing” to force Mayorkas to take enforcement action, even if the INA required it.
But then, a media that had largely ignored both the disaster at the border and the impact that Biden’s release of millions of illegal migrants into the United States had was forced to report on a series of high-profile and uniquely heinous offenses committed by aliens stopped by Border Patrol and released into the community on Mayorkas’s orders.
The Backlash to the Murder of Laken Riley
The innocent victim of alien crime who first captured the nation’s attention was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student murdered in broad daylight during what prosecutors described as an attempted rape in Athens, Ga., in February 2024 by Jose Ibarra.
Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered illegally in 2022, was apprehended by Border Patrol, and released, was arrested for child endangerment in New York in 2023 and for shoplifting in Georgia weeks later, prior to Riley’s killing.
Biden struggled to respond to this senseless crime, by (1) being forced to acknowledge her killing at his March 2024 State of the Union address; (2) misidentifying her as “Lincoln Riley”, the coach of the University of Southern California football team; (3) initially referring to her killer as an “illegal”; and then (4) apologizing for not referring to Ibarra as “undocumented” instead.
Note to ABC News: PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THE NEXT PART
When Republicans took control of the Senate in early January 2024, the first bill they passed (on a bipartisan basis) was S. 5, the “Laken Riley Act” — and I beg ABC News and every other outlet that talks about how few of the aliens DHS under Trump II is detaining are “violent criminals” to follow the next part very carefully.
Among other things, that law (signed by Trump in late January 2025): (1) reversed the Supreme Court by giving states standing to sue if DHS fails to take custody of aliens subject to mandatory detention under the INA; and (2) expanded the class of aliens DHS must detain under section 236(c) of the INA to include any alien 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”.
You’ll note that neither burglary, theft, larceny, nor shoplifting are defined as “violent felonies” by ABC News, the FBI, or NIJ, but Congress made clear the American people shouldn’t have to wait for criminal illegal aliens to kill, rape, rob, or assault innocent victims before DHS removes them from the streets.
And remember when I said states can sue to force DHS to detain aliens subject to mandatory detention?
That includes, pursuant to section 241(a)(2)(A) of the INA, all aliens under final orders of removal, and especially any alien removable on any criminal ground (including drug and firearms offenses, not just because of a violent felony), who DHS may “under no circumstance” release.
Criminal Aliens in ICE Detention
With all of that in mind, how many criminal aliens is ICE currently detaining?
The answer can be found in a series of Excel spreadsheets attached to the bottom of the agency’s “Detention Management” web page, and here’s what they reveal.
At present, there are 60,311 aliens in ICE detention, 51,428 of whom were arrested by ICE officers in the interior of the United States and 8,883 initially encountered by Border Patrol agents and CBP officers at the borders and the ports.
All inadmissible “applicants for admission” encountered CBP are subject to mandatory detention by ICE under section 235(b) of the INA, so the most important (and only salient) detainees under ABC News’s analysis are the nearly 51,500 aliens ICE is currently holding who its officers arrested in the interior.
Some 65 percent of the aliens first arrested by ICE being detained by the agency have either a criminal conviction (16,601, or 32.3 percent) or pending criminal charges (16,798, 32.7 percent), while the remaining 18,029 are “other immigration violators”, meaning they are being detained strictly on civil immigration grounds.
Of course, there’s no way to know how many of those other immigration violators are aliens under final orders of removal awaiting deportation, but at least some are, and likely many are.
But regardless, Congress has given the agency discretion in section 236(a) of the INA to detain any alien who is removable from the United States if they pose a danger to the community or are a risk of flight — and it’s not exactly news (or novel) for them to do so.
Trump II Is No Different from Biden
But here’s the kicker, which ABC News to its credit includes in paragraph 4 of its June 12 report: “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.” (Emphasis added.)
Returning to the points above, the Biden administration was so lax in arresting, detaining, and deporting criminals that: (1) Texas and Louisiana sued DHS over its then-policies; and (2) Congress passed the Laken Riley Act specifically to ensure the department never turned a blind eye to criminal aliens again.
And yet, when Trump II takes a larger number but the same percentage of alien killers, rapists, robbers, and assaulters into ICE custody and holds them, it’s somehow a violation of his “pledge to target the ‘worst of the worst’ criminal offenders”?
A pledge that, as noted, Trump never actually made, but regardless, can anyone make this all make sense?
The Other Parts You’re Not Being Told — Especially the Impact of “Sanctuaries”
Here’s the next part that ABC News isn’t telling you: Most aliens with “violent felony convictions” for homicide, sexual assault, and robbery are serving lengthy state sentences, and section 236(c) of the INA is clear that ICE isn’t to touch them until they are “released, without regard to whether” they are “released on parole, supervised release, or probation, and without regard to whether” they “may be arrested or imprisoned again for the same offense”.
And then the final fact ABC News never even alludes to, but which the Center has reported on in depth: More than half (56.3 percent) reside in “sanctuary jurisdictions”, that is:
cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.
Both Trump and his “Border Czar” Tom Homan would love to fill all of ICE’s 60,000-plus detention beds with alien killers, rapists, robbers, assaulters, burglars, thieves, larcenists, and shoplifters, but when at least half (likely more) of all alien criminals are being held or were released in jurisdictions that actively impede such enforcement, what do all of the media outlets and critics expect DHS to do?
Not the First Time, and It Won’t Be the Last
Ironically, sanctuary honchos and their cheerleaders latch onto half-baked claims like this to support why they won’t cooperate with ICE. This isn’t the first time I’ve explained that when it comes to criminal aliens, Trump II isn’t enforcing the immigration laws any differently than its predecessors did, or than the law requires — and regrettably, it likely won’t be the last.