A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”
The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.
However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.
The findings come from little-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally. The documents are filed when a person first encounters ICE, and DHS begins the deportation process, which is often when they are arrested. The documents contain biographical details about the person, including their criminal history, as well as any information that DHS feels is relevant to the immigration court case.
The documents released to the Guardian do not cover every arrest since Trump took office, but do cover everyone that DHS started deportation proceedings during most of 2025.
The Guardian analyzed data extracted from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, from January 2025 through mid-August 2025, and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is driven by the apprehension of people who have never been convicted of a crime.
The analysis also reveals:
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Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.
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Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.
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Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.
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Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.
The findings offer one of the most granular pictures yet of the criminal records of the tens of thousands of people swept up in DHS’s massive deportation campaign, building on reporting by the Guardian and others that show most of the people targeted for arrest and deportation are not violent criminals.
The expansion of immigration enforcement to broad, sweeping arrests, experts say, has led to a massive expansion of immigration detention, with the highest number of people held in US history.
“What is being conducted is dragnet enforcement with the goal of ensnaring as many people as possible in the detention and deportation process, despite all the public claims of the administration that they’re going up for the worst,” said Phil Neff, research coordinator with the University of Washington Center for Human Rights.
The documents reveal a different picture, Neff said. “It really represents a cross-section of society at large in the United States, of people who have been here for many years and who have close ties to communities.”
The Guardian reached out to DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for comment on the findings but did not receive a response before publication.
‘Worst of the worst’
DHS secretary Kristi Noem first used the phrase “worst of the worst” shortly after being confirmed by the Senate in January 2025, telling Sean Hannity that DHS was “picking up the worst of the worst in this country”. By the end of 2025, it was the administration’s go-to line, appearing in hundreds of press releases about its mass deportation efforts. DHS even launched a “worst of the worst” website complete with people’s blurry mugshots and the crimes DHS says they’ve been convicted of.
But the I-213 forms, also known as “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms, undercut those arguments.
The forms are one of the first things filled out after the government initiates deportation proceedings, said Chris Opila, staff attorney for transparency at the American Immigration Council, and are the key piece of evidence the government uses to prove that a person is eligible for deportation.
“It’s the record that ICE will produce in immigration court to substantiate its claims that this person is present in the United States unlawfully,” Opila said.
There are groups of people not included in the data release, such as immigrants who had deportation proceedings initiated before 2025 but who were arrested in 2025. The Guardian compared the data in the I-213 form release to other datasets released by ICE and found that it covers approximately 80% of the total arrests in 2025 covered in other datasets.
The documents do, however, include every person whom ICE apprehended for the first time in 2025 and show clearly whom the administration targeted during Trump’s second term in office.
The Guardian, working with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sued DHS and received spreadsheets with data extracted from I-213 forms.
Each form represents a person that the administration is trying to deport. The data contains details of more than 138,000 people swept up in the administration’s deportation pipeline in 2025. Each form contains a person’s name, how they entered the country, the number of children and each child’s citizenship, and detailed information about their criminal history. It is some of the most detailed data yet available on the people that the administration is trying to remove from the country.
The forms have each person’s criminal history, taken from the National Crime Information Center, an FBI database that tracks criminal justice data. The charges are tracked in broad categories, such as “sexual assault” and “immigration”, and sometimes less useful categories such as “general crimes”.
The Trump administration has apprehended people with criminal convictions, but the I-213 forms show that most convictions are for either traffic or immigration offenses, not violent crimes.
A Guardian analysis of the crimes people were convicted of found that only 1% of convictions were for sexual assault and only 400 – less than 1% of all convictions – were for homicide.
“This is not about removing the worst of the worst,” Opila said. “Enforcement is about removing whoever they can to feed a quota, regardless of how long these people have been in their communities, regardless of whether they have stable employment, regardless of what their family situation is in the United States. They’ve decided that they need to remove everyone possible.”
“If there was data that supported the administration’s position that it is only deporting the worst of the worst, the administration would publicize the data,” Opila added. “And they’re not doing that because the data doesn’t support it. We’d have something better than the memes.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
