ICE booked more than 43,000 people into detention in June, the highest monthly total since Trump returned to office, according to newly released agency data reported by CBS News. By the first eleven days of July, the detained population had already climbed to an average of 65,600 people. And nearly four in ten of them have no criminal record whatsoever.
The Numbers They Don't Want You Do the Math On
Let's start with the headline figure that Tom Homan is not putting on a banner. CBS News reports that as of early July, 29% of people in ICE detention had criminal convictions, and 31% had pending criminal charges. That means 40% had neither. Not a conviction. Not a charge. Nothing.
Homan went on Fox News and said, 'the majority of people we are arresting, despite the lies being told by the left, are criminals.' He was counting pending charges as criminals. Which is a neat trick, since in the United States, a pending charge means you have not been found guilty of anything. That's not a lie told by the left. That's the Sixth Amendment.
Homan can technically point to 60% having some criminal nexus if you squint at the numbers hard enough and define 'criminal' loosely enough to include people awaiting trial. But 26,000 people in detention with zero criminal record as of July 11 is not a rounding error. That's a policy choice, dressed up in talking points.
The Quota That Isn't a Quota
According to CBS News, the White House has been pushing ICE agents to hit 2,000 arrests per day. June averaged 1,438. The first eleven days of July averaged 1,593. The agency is climbing toward that target like it's a sales leaderboard at a car dealership.
A DHS spokesperson told CBS News that ICE does not have arrest quotas. DHS says this with a straight face while the White House is literally telling agents to hit 2,000 arrests per day. Words mean things. Or they used to.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, who said at his confirmation hearing that he wanted to shift toward an enforcement strategy that stayed out of the daily headlines, told reporters on Friday that arrests are 'hitting single-day records every single day.' Staying out of the headlines is going great.
Two Men Are Dead and the Policy Didn't Blink
This month, ICE agents fatally shot two men during vehicle stops, one in Texas and one in Maine. CBS News reports that neither man was the original target of the ICE operation. They were what DHS calls 'collateral' arrests. That is the actual official term. Collateral. Like they were a line item.
After the shootings, ICE agents were ordered to pause most vehicle stops. That pause lasted approximately as long as it took Trump to find his phone. He posted to Truth Social reversing the order, calling vehicle stops one of ICE's 'most important and effective Crime Fighting tools.' Homan confirmed on July 15 that the president's post was the policy now.
So the internal review process for two fatal shootings of people who weren't even the intended targets was: pause, presidential tweet, resume. That's the whole process. That's it.
The Stove Metaphor That Explains Everything
Mullin gave reporters a metaphor on Friday that deserves to live in infamy. 'I've turned down the temperature of the stove to try to get it correct without boiling over,' he said. 'When I say turn down the temperature, I turn down the temperature with you guys. We're turning up the heat on the streets.'
Translation: We are doing fewer press conferences about the crackdown so the crackdown gets less attention while the crackdown intensifies. The stove metaphor is actually accurate, just not in the way Mullin intended. He's describing a deliberate strategy to reduce media coverage of enforcement activity while ramping up that very activity. That's not a communications approach. That's a description of operating in the dark.
For what it's worth, the detention population already peaked at around 72,000 in January before declining through the spring. It's climbing again. If June's 65,600 represents the floor of the next surge, not the ceiling, the math gets very grim very fast.
Who Is Actually Being Detained
CBS News lays out a pattern that has been consistent since the crackdown began: shifts in the detained population are driven almost entirely by changes in the number of people without criminal records. When detention grew, that group grew fastest. When it shrank earlier this year, that group fell 36% compared to 3% among those with criminal convictions.
Now that detention is climbing again, the non-criminal population jumped 20% in the first eleven days of July alone, from roughly 22,000 to just over 26,000. People with criminal convictions increased 5% in the same window.
So when Homan goes on television and says the arrests are focused on criminals, the agency's own data is telling a different story. The non-criminal population is the most volatile, the most responsive to policy pressure, and right now the fastest-growing segment of who ICE is locking up. Those are ICE's numbers. Not ours.
The Dingo Take
Here's the thing about the 'we're only targeting criminals' talking point: it keeps colliding with the data the government itself releases. ICE's own numbers show that when enforcement ramps up, the people without criminal records pile into detention faster than anyone else. Every single time. It happened at the start of the crackdown, and it's happening again right now in July. If the policy were actually surgical, the non-criminal population would be stable. It is not stable. It is spiking.
Two people are dead this month who were not even the intended targets of the operations that killed them. The internal response to those deaths lasted about as long as a Trump Truth Social attention span. The pause was reversed by tweet. Homan confirmed it on camera the same day. And detention is climbing toward numbers we haven't seen since January. None of this is secret. It's all in the data that DHS publishes.
There's a word for a system that detains tens of thousands of people with no criminal record, ramps up arrests under informal quotas that officials deny are quotas, kills bystanders during enforcement operations, reverses the subsequent safety review via social media post, and then goes on Fox News to insist the majority of those detained are dangerous criminals. The word is 'out of control.' The stove metaphor is real, but Mullin has it backwards. The temperature is not being managed. It is rising.
