A Guardian analysis of government records found that the vast majority – 77% – of those entering deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal convictions, exposing the stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) coined a phrase that his surrogates would 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 — the administration’s relentless campaign to focus 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.
Findings from lesser-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally. Paperwork is filed when a person first encounters ICE and DHS begins deportation proceedings, which is often when they are arrested. The documents include biographical details about the individual, including their criminal history, as well as any information DHS deems relevant to the immigration court case.
The documents released to the Guardian don’t cover every arrest since Trump took office, but they cover everyone for whom DHS has started deportation proceedings through most of 2025.
The Guardian analyzed data collected from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms from January 2025 to mid-August 2025 and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is fueling fears of people who have never been convicted of a crime.
The analysis also reveals:
Less than half of the people in the data (40%) had criminal convictions against them, and only 23% had a felony conviction.
About half of those convicted were for nonviolent traffic and immigration offenses.
Traffic offenses alone account for nearly 30% of convictions, by far the largest category.
9% of convictions were for assault, only 1% for sexual assault and only 0.5% for homicide.
The findings provide one of the most granular pictures of the criminal records of tens of thousands of people caught up in DHS’s massive deportation campaign, showing that many of the people targeted for arrest and deportation are not violent criminals, based on reporting by the Guardian and others.
The expansion of immigration enforcement to widespread, mass arrests has led to a massive expansion of immigration detention, experts say, holding the largest number of people in US history.
“Dragnet enforcement is being conducted with the goal of ensnaring as many people as possible in the detention and deportation process, despite all the administration’s public claims that they’re going bad,” said Phil Neff, University of Washington human rights research coordinator.
The documents reveal a different picture, Neff said. “It really represents a cross section of society at large in the United States, people who have been here for many years and have close ties to the communities.”
The Guardian reached out to DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for comment on the findings but did not receive a response prior to publication.
‘The worst of the worst’
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem first used the phrase “the worst of the worst” shortly after Senate confirmation in January 2025, telling Sean Hannity that DHS “picks the worst of this country.” By the end of 2025, this will be the administration’s go-to line, appearing in hundreds of press releases about its mass deportation efforts. DHS has launched a “worst of the worst” website, complete with blurry mugshots of people DHS says they’ve been convicted of.
But I-213 forms, also known as “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms, undercut those claims.
The forms are one of the first things filled out after the government begins deportation proceedings, said Chris Opila, staff attorney for transparency at the American Immigration Council, and are key evidence the government uses to prove a person is eligible for deportation.
“This is the record that ICE presents in immigration court to substantiate its claims that this person is in the United States illegally,” Opila said.
Groups of people not included in the data release include immigrants who started deportation proceedings before 2025 and were arrested in 2025. The Guardian compared the data from the I-213 form release to other datasets released by ICE and found that it accounted for nearly all of the other 2025 arrests. 80% coverage was found.
However, the documents include every person apprehended by ICE for the first time in 2025 and clearly show who the administration is targeting during Trump’s second term in office.
The Guardian, along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sued DHS and received spreadsheets with data gleaned from I-213 forms.
Each form represents the person the administration is trying to deport. The data includes details of more than 138,000 people in the administration’s deportation pipeline in 2025. Each form includes a person’s name, how they entered the country, the number of children, and detailed information about each child’s citizenship and criminal history. This is the most detailed data yet available on the people the administration is trying to remove from the country.
The forms include each person’s criminal history, which is taken from the National Crime Information Center, an FBI database that tracks criminal justice data. Allegations are tracked in broad categories such as “sexual harassment” and “immigration,” and sometimes in less useful categories such as “general crimes.”
The Trump administration has arrested people with criminal convictions, but I-213 forms show that most of the convictions were for traffic or immigration offenses, not violent crimes.
A Guardian analysis of people convicted of crimes found that only 1% of convictions were for sexual assault and only 400 – less than 1% of all convictions – were for murder.
“It’s not about getting rid of the worst of the worst,” Opila said. “Enforcement means removing anyone they can to feed the quota, regardless of how long these people have been in their communities, regardless of whether they have steady employment, regardless of what their family status is in the United States. They decided to remove everyone they could.”
“If there is data to support the administration’s position, it will only expel the worst of the worst, the administration will promote the data,” Opila added. “They’re not doing it because the data doesn’t support it. We’ll have something better than memes.”
