Which of these stories about immigration do you believe?
Many millions of unauthorized immigrants had been living happily as contributing members of American communities for decades, until ICE started cruelly and violently arresting them under the Trump administration.
The Democrats let untold millions of violent criminals into our country. ICE is merely enforcing existing laws to remove murderers and rapists, a long over-due increase in deportations.
As is so often the case, these conflicting stories are both partially right. Because of the intense polarization on this topic, most people believe an uncomfortable mix of truth and half-truth.
Red frame problems: The “enforcing existing law against criminals” frame is contradicted by the administration’s own data and its own officials’ statements. They’re not primarily deporting criminals; they’ve eliminated criminal prioritization, set arrest quotas, and 73% of detainees have no convictions. “Border Czar” Homan says non-criminals will “go too.” MAGA voices like the Heritage foundation criticize the administration for not deporting all unauthorized immigrants.
Blue frame problems: The “happy contributing members living peacefully for decades” frame misses that there genuinely was a massive increase in unauthorized immigration under Biden (from 458,000 in 2020 to a record 2.2 million in 2022), that this caused enormous stress on some communities, that there are more than a million unexecuted removal orders from immigration judges, and that the Obama administration was itself deporting ~1,000 people per day in its first term, about the same as Trump is currently managing.
Unauthorized immigrants commit crimes, but not that many
I’ve now heard many personal reports of Red-Blue arguments about immigration policy that seem to stall in the same way, with Red asking incredulously “why are you protecting murderers and rapists?”
There really are cases of unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes. Some people are tracking them and collecting the names of the victims.
A collage of victims of crimes by unauthorized immigrants that has circulated since 2024. The original post from LibsOfTikTok includes their names, which I have largely verified.
If you’re on the Blue side this may seem overwrought, but it’s not wrong to care about these people — even if these cases are a minority. If you’re having a hard time understanding why Red would be so upset about these edge cases, perhaps it’s worth comparing this to the many lists of names of black people shot by the police. Even if far more black homicide victims are not killed by police, there is something deeply unfair and upsetting about those who are.
Yet the broader numbers also tell an important story. The overwhelming majority of immigrants (of whatever kind) are law abiding. Every possible statistic on the topic shows this clearly. Only 23 out of 14,500 homicides in 2025 were by unauthorized immigrants, according to CBP. Overall, immigrants (of whatever kind) commit fewer crimes than U.S. born citizens, and have for the last 150 years.
Incarceration rates of immigrants vs. us-born (Source)
Arrests are shifting from criminals to non-criminals
Most Red Americans believe that the Trump administration is deporting only people with a criminal record, while most Blue Americans believe the opposite. Both are half right. A majority of those arrested so far have a criminal record. But the share of arrests of people without a criminal record are increasing.
Also, the fraction of those who have committed a violent crime remains small, about five percent — just the red fraction at the bottom of the New York Times chart above. Whatever the justification for these deportations, they are mostly not removing violent criminals, as DHS claims.
Part of what is going on here is that a vocal Red minority want to restrict immigration generally, unauthorized or not. The Administration’s public message has mostly been about removing unauthorized immigrants with a criminal record — and this idea remains very popular. Yet the underlying legal instruments do not make this distinction, and many Administration officials have repeatedlysaid the goal is to remove all unauthorized immigrants — a policy which is unpopular among Americans generally.
So there is a political bait and switch happening here: the Administration is saying that it’s all about criminals, as with their slick “worst of the worst” site. But a bit over half of Republican voters want all unauthorized immigrants gone, and in fact arrests are increasingly shifting to people with no criminal record.
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Deportations aren’t really up, but they’ve moved inland
So far the second Trump administration has deported something like 1000 people per day. This is about the same as Obama, but way higher than Biden. These numbers seem to be ramping up, but so far, there aren’t really any more people being deported than a decade ago.
But where people are being deported from has changed. The number of “interior” deportations, far from the border, has increased four and half times, according to the Deportation Data Project:
We arrive at this estimate of the change in the number of deportations based on two key analytical choices. First, we consider only deportations that started with an arrest by ICE inside the United States. By separating interior and border enforcement, two countervailing trends emerge: the rise in interior enforcement on the one hand and decline in border enforcement on the other. The decline in arrests at the Southwest border continued a trend that began under the Biden Administration. (Notably, research by one of us demonstrates that federal border policy influences trends in immigrants’ arrivals less than commonly thought.)
If it feels like we’re in a new era of immigration enforcement, we are. But this isn’t really because more people are being deported. Rather, the focus has shifted to interior enforcement in cities, which is more likely to target people who have been here for some time.
On top of this, Trump is targeting “Democrat” cities and states (in his own words) which is about political “retribution” (in his own words). This of course feels deeply unfair to Blue America.
Are we communicating yet?
Hopefully, you learned something in all of this. There’s an argument over whether the Administration is really deporting just “the worst of the worst” as they repeatedly claim. Is ICE deporting murderers and rapists? Yes, but mostly no. There’s an argument over whether deportations are even up at all. Do we live in an era of mass deportations? Not more so than under Obama, but the who and where has drastically changed.
With any luck, this dive into into the weeds of immigration enforcement will help you have a better conversation the next time you get into it with your misguided relatives. If we’re fighting, at least we should be clear on what we’re fighting about.
Do you know what % of Obama deportees had criminal/violent crime convictions?
Thank you for addressing this subject.
I do think the methodologies and rhetoric of the current administration as opposed to the Obama years.. is what is making middle Americans upset.
Immigration reform and government funding of the immigration court systems I believe are ongoing problems .