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DHS has published at least ten bulletins under the "Worst of the Worst" label in the first 15 days of September 2026 alone — roughly one every day and a half.
- The newest independent snapshot from TRAC , a Syracuse University data center, found that 70.6% of the 65,765 people in ICE custody as of July 11, 2026 had no criminal conviction whatsoever.
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DHS's recurring "70% are criminals" claim blends actual convictions with unproven pending charges. A
FactCheck.org review
of the same government data puts the true convicted-or-charged share at 66%, and fresh figures reported this month show 55% of August arrestees had never once been arrested or charged with anything before.
A Bulletin Almost Every Other Day
On September 15, the Department of Homeland Security put out its latest "Worst of the Worst" bulletin, describing arrests for kidnapping, armed battery, robbery and drug possession. It was at least the tenth release carrying that same headline since the start of the month. DHS's own newsroom feed shows matching bulletins on September 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 14 as well — a release nearly every day and a half, not the "every other business day" pace the frequency might suggest at first glance.
"Every day, the men and women of ICE are risking their lives," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in the September 15 statement, which described that day's arrests as targeting kidnappers, an armed attacker and several robbery suspects. The messaging has been remarkably consistent all year: DHS also announced in early September that ICE made a record 50,925 arrests in August, its third straight monthly high.
What Independent Trackers Are Finding
The volume of arrests isn't in dispute. Who is actually being arrested is. TRAC, the nonpartisan immigration data project at Syracuse University, reported that of the 65,765 people ICE held in detention as of July 11, 46,436 — 70.6% — had never been convicted of a crime. Many of the remaining convictions, TRAC notes, are for minor offenses like traffic violations.
That gap has only widened in the months since. Newly obtained federal arrest data cited by The Hill this month found that 55% of people ICE arrested had never once crossed paths with police or a courtroom, and another 24% faced charges that never resulted in a conviction.
Where DHS's "70%" Figure Comes From
DHS has repeatedly told the public that roughly 70% of those it arrests are criminals, a figure senior officials have used since at least early 2026 and that the agency's own social media account continues to cite. The claim doesn't hold up against DHS's own underlying numbers, according to a FactCheck.org analysis of arrest data obtained through the federally litigated Deportation Data Project: those with either a prior conviction or a pending charge — two very different legal statuses the administration counts as one — actually made up 66% of arrests in Trump's first year, not 70%. And the share of arrestees with no criminal record of any kind, meaning neither a conviction nor a charge, rose from about 22% in the administration's first three months to more than 40% by mid-October 2025.
"The 70 percent figure has not been true since May of 2025," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told The Hill, arguing that DHS has kept repeating an outdated statistic even as its own data moved further away from it.
Convictions Rarely Mean Violent Crime
Even among people ICE arrests who do have a criminal record, serious violent offenses are the exception. David Bier, who leads immigration research at the libertarian Cato Institute, analyzed nonpublic ICE data and found that only 8% of convictions involved a violent or property crime, with about 5% classified as violent. Bier said many of those cases amount to "someone had an altercation at a bar" rather than the murders and assaults DHS bulletins typically headline.
A separate American Immigration Council review of the same federal data found that during the peak of at-large street arrests between December 2025 and January 2026 — which averaged 1,264 arrests a day, more than triple the rate from a year earlier — roughly two-thirds of the people picked up had no criminal record at all.
What It Means for Latino Communities
The gap between rhetoric and data isn't abstract for the communities most affected by it. DHS's own bulletins, reviewed across dozens of releases this year, repeatedly identify people from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic — countries of origin for much of the country's Spanish-speaking population. None of the organizations cited here dispute that ICE has arrested people with genuinely violent histories; TRAC, Cato and the American Immigration Council all say that group exists within the total. The disagreement is over proportion — whether it defines who is actually being detained, as DHS's messaging suggests, or whether, as the data through this summer indicates, it remains a minority.
