Nearly all immigrants detained in Trump Chicago raid had no criminal conviction

More than 97% of immigrants detained in the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago had no criminal conviction, according to federal court records.

The data, released on Friday and first reported by the Chicago Tribune, sharply contradicts the Trump administration’s portrayal of the immigration sweeps as an effort to fight crime and, as Trump himself has described it, targeting the “worst of the worst”.

Of the 614 immigrants arrested in the Chicago operation, which began in September, just 16 had significant criminal histories, according to federal data submitted to the court by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of a lawsuit. Ten of the detainees were either convicted of or face charges for some form of assault, battery or domestic violence. One had been convicted of enticement of a minor and kidnapping. One was labeled a “foreign criminal”. Two had drunk-driving convictions.

The rest of the migrants arrested in the Chicago deportation operation had neither criminal convictions nor pending charges, according to the data. In a column labeled “Risk to Public Safety,” federal authorities described three dozen other of the arrested migrants as “high”. The vast majority were labeled as low risks to public safety, though the data described almost all of them as flight risks.

The data was submitted to a federal court in the case of Castañon Nava v Department of Homeland Security, in which plaintiffs accuse the DHS of violating a 2022 consent decree that limits the federal immigration agents’ ability to arrest migrants without a warrant.

The DHS submitted a separate document to the court describing an additional 39 detainees as security threats, but did not state a reason for categorizing them that way, according to a spokesperson for the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the legal groups representing the plaintiffs in the federal case.

The wide gap between the migrant detainees’ criminal histories and the Trump administration’s broad portrayal of unauthorized migrants as criminals has emerged as a recurring theme since he re-took office. On the day of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order that scrapped policies prioritizing the arrest and removal of unauthorized migrants with serious criminal records.

The same dynamic became clear earlier this year, as the DHS enacted a series of high-profile immigration sweeps in southern California.

While Trump publicly claimed that his administration was targeting criminals for removal and deporting the “worst of the worst”, records obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley School of Law showed a similar pattern of arresting unauthorized migrants without serious criminal histories. More than two-thirds of a total of 722 migrants arrested in the Los Angeles area from 1 to 10 June had no criminal convictions, the data showed, while 58% had not faced criminal charges.

DHS assistant secretary Tricia Mclaughlin called the Chicago data “horrendously misleading” in a statement emailed to the Guardian. Her statement said that 70% of migrants arrested by ICE nationally have either criminal convictions or pending charges.

But that figure – which is actually 64%, according to the Guardian’s data tracker – marks a major shift since Trump re-took office in January. Those with no criminal record or pending charges accounted for just 6% of immigrant detainees in the waning days of the Joe Biden administration.

The Guardian has previously reported that those without convictions or pending charges now make up the single largest group of detainees in ICE custody, at approximately 36%.