Two numbers that sound like opposites are both, in their own terms, accurate. On July 24 the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary, Lauren Bis, said that 'nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the United States' [1].
TRAC, which tracks the agency's own detention records, reported that as of July 11, 46,436 of the 65,765 people held in ICE detention - 70.6 percent - have no criminal conviction [2].
The reconciliation is the word 'or.' A criminal charge is an accusation that has not been tested; a conviction is a finding of guilt. A statistic that adds them together can describe a population as criminal on the strength of allegations alone.
The researcher Austin Kocher, working from ICE's data, put numbers to how much weight that conjunction carries: of the 11,296-person growth in ICE detention this fiscal year, 72 percent had no criminal conviction, 20 percent had only pending charges, and 8 percent had convictions [3]. The accusations are most of the difference.
The two figures also count different things, which is worth saying plainly: Bis is describing arrests, while TRAC is describing the people in detention on a given day. The point is not that one refutes the other on identical terms. It is that the arrest statistic is offered as a description of who is being taken - and when those same people are counted after they arrive, seven in ten have not been convicted of anything [1][2].
TRAC adds that among those who do have convictions, many are minor, including traffic violations [2]. At 1,400 to 1,600 arrests a day, the distance between 'charged' and 'convicted' is not a technicality [1]. It is 46,436 people [2].
