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“ICE makes it sound like they are snatching wanted felons off the streets when it conducts these operations,” said Austin C. Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration enforcement data.
“We don’t get a full picture,” he said. “They downplay the large numbers of people detained and deported who committed minor offenses, usually a long time ago, or who had no crime on record.”
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Under the Trump administration, there has been a steady rise in immigrants detained without a serious record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which has compiled data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
TRAC found that a jump in the number of detained immigrants in 2019 was a direct result of arrests of people with no criminal records.
“ICE makes it sound like they are snatching wanted felons off the streets when it conducts these operations,” said Austin C. Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration enforcement data.
“We don’t get a full picture,” he said. “They downplay the large numbers of people detained and deported who committed minor offenses, usually a long time ago, or who had no crime on record.”
Of the 50,000 people in immigrant detention facilities on the last day of April 2019, nearly two-thirds had no criminal record, up from 40 percent four years earlier, under the administration of President Barack Obama, according to TRAC. Among detainees who had committed crimes, a higher percentage had been convicted of infractions such as driving without a license or immigration violations; a lower proportion of detained immigrants had committed violent crimes than before.
The most recent deportation data available, for the first five months of the 2020 fiscal year, shows that 52 percent of those removed from the country had no criminal record, according to TRAC, up from about 40 percent in each of the previous three fiscal years.
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