Photo courtesy of ICE Democrats and liberals believe they have stumbled onto a smoking gun that will prove their contention that ICE is Na...
Democrats and liberals believe they have stumbled onto a smoking gun that will prove their contention that ICE is Nazis and that the United States should have open borders. According to a leaked internal DHS document allegedly obtained by CBS News and reported on February 9, 2026, less than 14 percent of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE during the first year of the Trump administration had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
Neither DHS nor CBS has published the document. As a result, the CBS report relies entirely on numbers the network claims to have seen, without allowing independent verification. The story has since been repeated across multiple mainstream media outlets, none of which have seen the document themselves and all of which are simply referencing the original CBS report.
It is important to note that being in the country illegally is itself grounds for deportation. No additional criminal charges are required, and one hundred percent of deportees meet this criterion.
The media often claim that people with pending asylum cases, green card holders, or individuals legally present in the country have been deported. This is untrue. A more accurate statement is that many people who previously held legal status lost that status for reasons such as violating the terms of a residency permit, missing a court date, or having an application denied. None of these constitute a criminal conviction or criminal charges, which helps explain the low percentage of deportees with criminal records.
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has publicly countered the CBS framing by stating that 70 percent of arrests involve “criminal illegal aliens.” That higher figure includes non-violent offenses such as traffic violations, DUI, or illegal entry. While illegal entry is often assumed to be a misdemeanor, it can be prosecuted as a felony. In practice, it frequently is not, because the government’s primary objective is deportation rather than incarceration.
Under the illegal re-entry statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1326, any individual who has previously been deported and then returns unlawfully commits an automatic felony punishable by up to two years in prison.
The remaining deportees were in the country illegally through either illegal entry or visa overstay. Under Title 8 of the U.S. Code, unlawful presence alone is a deportable offense regardless of criminal history.
Another factor inflating the “non-criminal” numbers is what ICE refers to as collateral arrests. Under current 2025 and 2026 guidelines, officers are instructed to arrest any undocumented individual they encounter while executing a warrant for someone else. If ICE goes to a home or apartment complex to arrest one person for a violent felony and encounters additional illegal aliens, all are arrested. In the data, this appears as one criminal arrest alongside multiple non-criminal administrative arrests, even though all are unlawfully present.
ICE has also returned to a no-exemptions enforcement posture. Under earlier policies, agents might have arrested a criminal target and left undocumented family members behind. Now, everyone present without legal status is generally taken into custody. As enforcement has shifted away from jail-based arrests and toward at-large community operations, officers are increasingly encountering entire households. This shift lowers the percentage of arrests involving criminal charges without changing the total number of people legally subject to removal.
A second major category counted as “non-criminal” consists of individuals with final orders of removal. Recent 2025 and 2026 trends show that roughly 30 to 40 percent of interior ICE arrests involve people who were already ordered to leave by an immigration judge but failed to comply.
ICE has expanded its focus on Fugitive Operations, targeting those who skipped court or ignored deportation orders. While these individuals may not have committed a new street crime, they are fugitives under immigration law, which further explains why they are labeled “non-criminal” in media reporting.
Taken together, the widely cited 14 percent figure is a statistical artifact of broad enforcement rather than evidence of indiscriminate targeting. When enforcement is applied to entire households and long-standing immigration fugitives, the criminal percentage inevitably declines. Yet in every case, whether a primary target, a collateral arrest, or a fugitive from a prior court order, one hundred percent are unlawfully present and legally subject to removal.
If Democrats are genuinely concerned about the ratio of violent offenders to individuals with no criminal record, they could significantly alter that ratio by turning over violent offenders and convicted criminals currently shielded by sanctuary jurisdictions. As of February 10, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security has directly accused California of releasing thousands of criminal offenders who could have been deported if local authorities had cooperated with ICE.
California’s sanctuary policies, particularly Senate Bill 54, restrict local law enforcement from notifying ICE or honoring detainers that request offenders be held for pickup. On February 6, 2026, DHS reported that since January 20, 2025, California jurisdictions released 4,561 criminal illegal aliens into the community despite active ICE detainers.
DHS states these releases included individuals charged with or convicted of 31 homicides, 661 assaults, and 234 sexual offenses. Had those offenders been transferred to ICE custody, they would have been deported, substantially increasing the proportion of deportees with serious criminal records.
The dispute has intensified amid a broader clash between Sacramento and Washington. ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons recently urged California officials to honor detainers for 33,179 illegal aliens currently held in the state’s jails and prisons. DHS claims this group includes nearly 400 murderers and more than 1,200 sexual predators.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s office has dismissed those figures as misleading, arguing that California cooperates with ICE for inmates convicted of serious or violent felonies in state prisons. At the same time, the state continues to restrict cooperation in county jails, where many offenders are held pretrial or for offenses classified as non-serious under state law.
By blocking ICE access to violent offenders already in custody, sanctuary jurisdictions force enforcement into the community. When agents search for a single criminal target, they frequently arrest additional undocumented individuals in the same household or neighborhood.
That policy choice inflates non-criminal arrest numbers and drives down the apparent percentage of violent offenders, producing the very statistics now being cited as evidence of misconduct.
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