Who’s in ICE detention in California? According to ICE, less than 30% are criminals

When Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Hesperia, recently visited the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, the three-term member of Congress saw detainees wearing colored uniforms based on their criminal record. Detainees in blue, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff told him, were of the lowest risk level, while those in orange or red uniforms had committed felonies while in the United States.

“That was astonishing to me, because almost all of the detainees that I saw were in either orange or red,” Obernolte said Thursday, July 17. “There were hardly any blue uniforms.”

The high percentage of detainees classified as criminals at the Adelanto ICE center is an exception, however, according to the agency’s own data.

About every two weeks, ICE releases updated data on those it detains. According to data released on July 7, 69% of the 213 detainees at the High Desert center Obernolte visited on July 11 were criminals. The classification includes both convicted criminals and those with pending criminal charges.

But statewide, only 28.26% of the 3,284 people currently in detention are criminals, according to ICE.

That’s not unusual. Nationwide, there were 47,238 people being detained by ICE as of July 7. According to the agency, 13,656 of those detained — 28.9% — were categorized as criminals.

ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Threat levels

President Donald Trump‘s administration has repeatedly said it’s targeting “the worst of the worst” — including terrorists, gang members and violent criminals — in the immigration sweeps that began soon after his second inauguration on Jan. 20.

But ICE is detaining more than violent criminals, according to its own data.

The agency sorts those it detains into four “threat levels.”

“Threat level is determined by the criminality of a detainee, including the recency of the criminal behavior and its severity,” the footnotes in ICE’s Detention Statistics spreadsheet explains. “A detainee can be graded on a scale of one to three with one being the highest severity. If a detainee has no criminal convictions, he/she will be classified as ‘No ICE Threat Level.’ “

As of July 7, 36.43% of the detainees at the Adelanto ICE center were categorized “Threat Level 1.”

“These numbers confirm what we’ve been seeing for years, that the overwhelming majority of people in ICE detention do not pose any threat to public safety,” Javier Hernandez, executive director of the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, wrote in an email on Thursday, July 17.

“In fact, only a small fraction are classified as ‘Threat Level 1,’ and even that designation is often vague and not always based on actual convictions,” he continued.

California detainees

The Adelanto ICE center had a higher percentage of both criminals and those categorized as “Threat Level 1” among its detainees than California’s five other ICE detention centers.

As of July 7, there were 3,284 detainees in the six detention facilities combined, according to ICE. The agency characterized 28.26% of them as criminals and 10.81% as “Threat Level 1.” And 83.7% of the detainees in California were categorized as “No ICE Threat Level.”

According to the data:

• The Adelanto ICE Processing Center had 213 detainees, 69% of them classified as criminals and 36.43% characterized as “Threat Level 1.”
• The Desert View Annex in Adelanto had 412 detainees, 35.14% of them classified as criminals, 3.62% characterized as “Threat Level 1.”
• The Golden State Annex in McFarland had 582 detainees, 50.76% of them classified as criminals, 22.55% characterized as “Threat Level 1.”
• The Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico had 667 detainees, 13.63% of them classified as criminals, 5.12% of them characterized as “Threat Level 1.”
• The Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield had 60 detainees, 88.83% of them classified as criminals, 49.85% of them characterized as “Threat Level 1.”
• The Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego had 1,360 detainees, 14.57% of them classified as criminals, 4.97% of them characterized as “Threat Level 1.”

On July 2, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, along with other local advocacy groups, sued the Department of Homeland Security — which administers ICE — accusing the federal government of unconstitutionally arresting and detaining people for the sake of meeting arrest quotas. In May, Trump aide Stephen Miller directed ICE to make 3,000 immigration arrests per day.

“The objective of this draconian crackdown is to eviscerate basic rights to due process and to shield from public view the horrifying ways ICE and Border Patrol agents treat citizens and residents who have been stigmatized by our government as violent criminals based on skin color alone,” Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation at Public Counsel, representing the plaintiffs, said in an ACLU news release.

Meanwhile, the number of immigrants detained by ICE in California is the highest it’s been since Trump’s first term:

• In 2019, the agency detained 4,375 people in nine facilities.
• In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, that number fell to 966 people in seven facilities.
• In 2021, after the election of President Joe Biden, and as the pandemic continued, the number fell further to 794 in eight facilities.
• In 2022, the number of people detained by ICE in California rose to 1,530 in seven facilities.
• In 2023, ICE held 1,955 people in six California detention centers.
• And in 2024, the agency held 2,664 people in six California facilities.

Gaps in data

The data ICE releases about twice each month doesn’t include information on who is detained in each center, what specific crimes they’ve allegedly committed, if they’ve been convicted of those crimes or other details. The reports also exclude those being detained in hospitals, hotels, Office of Refugee Resettlement or Mexican Interior Repatriation Program facilities.

The lack of clarity in the data the agency releases is no accident, according to Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science at UCLA.

“ICE in particular does not want to release this information,” he said.

The agency’s traditional lack of transparency has been a concern for Blair, and is now heightened by Trump’s return to office.

“A group of us came together in the fall, and realized that given what kind of promises and threats Donald Trump was making around immigration, it was going to be important to be able to fact-check what they’re saying,” he said.

Blair and others created the Deportation Data Project, which publishes data obtained through federal Freedom of Information Act requests from ICE.

The data the project has received, in three waves as of mid-July, has underscored that the White House rhetoric around the detentions doesn’t match what ICE’s own records are saying.

Among “the (detainees) that do have offenses, the biggest category is traffic infractions,” Blair said. “Only 8% of detainees have been convicted of violent crimes and that’s a far cry from what (the White House’s) claims are.”

The Trump administration’s immigration raids this year have inspired protests across Southern California. But Obernolte argued the federal government is belatedly enforcing existing laws.

“I would certainly like to work with my colleagues in Congress to fix our broken immigration system,” he said. “But we should be able to agree that the law ought to be enforced.”

Despite the United States being deeply divided politically, Blair thinks releasing accurate and more detailed information on who ICE is detaining is important — and it’s making a difference.

Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in America and a supporter of Trump’s reelection, called ICE rounding up migrant workers whose only crime was being in the country illegally “insane.”

“Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?” Rogan said on his July 2 show.

“I think when you have the ACLU and Joe Rogan both saying there’s something wrong with these arrests,” Blair said, “hopefully these conversations will break through and help people understand what it means to arrest 3,000 people a day and who’s being arrested.”