Texas ICE Arrests Reveal a Striking Departure From the "Worst of the Worst" Promise

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

The Trump administration came into office promising to target the most dangerous undocumented immigrants — the "worst of the worst," officials said. But new data from a UC Berkeley-backed research initiative tells a sharply different story, at least in Texas, where ICE has been more active than anywhere else in the country.

From February 2025 to February 2026, ICE agents in Texas arrested more than 38,100 immigrants who had no criminal convictions or pending charges — while making 30,670 arrests of people with criminal convictions and about 22,720 with pending charges. In other words, people with no criminal history now make up the single largest group being arrested in the state.

Texas is the state with the highest number of ICE arrests by far. During 2025, a reported 24% of all national ICE arrests took place in the state. That makes Texas ground zero for understanding how the administration's enforcement priorities have evolved — and whether they match the original rhetoric.

How the Shift Happened

According to a dataset released by professors at the UC Berkeley School of Law, the agency's arrests of people who only have immigration-related offenses have far exceeded the number of those with pending criminal charges and convictions since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Initially, White House officials claimed the president's aggressive immigration sweeps were only targeting the "worst of the worst," and the data seemed to reflect that objective — at least at first.

The shift came in June 2025, just weeks after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reportedly called the head of every ICE Field Office into a room in Washington, D.C., and ordered them to "just go out there and arrest illegal aliens." By December of that same year, ICE had arrested twice as many individuals in Texas without criminal charges or convictions as it did convicted criminals.

Immigration attorneys point to one group in particular swelling the noncriminal numbers: asylum seekers who voluntarily attend scheduled ICE check-ins tied to claims filed years earlier, in some cases dating back to the Biden administration or even Trump's first term. ICE is also increasingly targeting immigrants when they arrive for court hearings or routine immigration appointments, with agents arresting people at federal buildings in El Paso, immigration courts in San Antonio, and probation offices in Dallas.

The Government's Pushback

The Department of Homeland Security disputes this framing. It argues that close to 70% of arrests nationwide involve people it classifies as "criminal illegal aliens," and has suggested that some people counted as clean-record cases may carry offenses from other countries that never surface in U.S. databases. Researchers and journalists covering the data, however, say the agency has not produced documentation to back up that claim.

A UCLA Luskin School analysis found that the share of Latino arrestees who met the government's own bar for a genuine public-safety threat fell from 28% under the Biden administration to 12% under Trump. By early 2026, only about one in ten arrests involved someone in that serious-threat category, compared with roughly one in five in early 2024.

What This Means on the Ground

Because Latino immigrants make up the overwhelming majority of people targeted in these operations, researchers argue that the shift away from criminal cases functions, in effect, as a policy that reshapes Latino neighborhoods specifically. Communities that have lived in Texas for years — in some cases decades — are now navigating a reality where showing up to a scheduled government appointment can result in detention and deportation.

The data project behind these figures continues to release new updates, and DHS and outside researchers are likely to keep disputing how "criminal" should be counted in enforcement statistics. For now, the space between the administration's original target — dangerous offenders — and the people actually showing up in arrest logs remains the central tension in Texas's immigration enforcement debate. As the numbers continue to mount, the gap between promise and practice will only become harder to ignore.