ICE Says Arrests of Immigrants Without Criminal Records Will Continue After Weekend Guidance Officials Call a 'Miscommunication'

A Weekend Order Nobody Will Own

Sometime Friday night, ICE offices across the country got word to ease off. Officers were told to hold back on arresting people who had no criminal conviction or pending charge, and to stop picking up other removable people they happened to run into while chasing a specific target^[2][5]. By Saturday evening, that guidance was gone, replaced with new instructions saying nothing had changed at all^[2][4]. In between, the Department of Homeland Security called the entire story false.

Both things are true. Guidance went out. And DHS said, on the record, that no such guidance existed. That's not really a contradiction once you look at the timeline closely — it's a same-day reversal that different outlets caught at different points, which is why the public record now reads like two separate stories instead of one.

What The Daily Wire Reported, and What DHS Said Back

The Daily Wire's Jennie Taer broke the story Saturday, citing agency sources who said officers had been told, "for the time being," to arrest only people with criminal convictions or pending charges^[1][2]. The report said this would also end so-called collateral arrests — cases where officers go after one target and pick up other removable people they find along the way, such as a roommate or coworker^[1].

DHS pushed back hard. A spokesperson called the report "false," saying "no one is off the table" and that "anyone in our country illegally will be arrested and deported"^[1][3]. The agency paired that denial with an announcement of its own: a "nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities" aimed at "criminal illegal aliens"^[3]. Sanctuary jurisdictions limit how much local police cooperate with ICE, so officers there often have to make arrests out in the community instead of picking people up at a local jail — which is exactly where collateral arrests tend to happen^[2][3].

The Nine Sources Who Said the First Story Was Right

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin then went further than the flat denial. He said he'd spoken with President Trump and nine ICE and DHS sources, and they told a more complicated story^[2]. Verbal guidance to scale back arrests really had gone out Friday night, they said, and some agents who received it were "shocked and frustrated"^[2][5].

Officials described it as an honest mistake — a "miscommunication" that happened during internal talks about arresting the "worst first"^[2]. New instructions went out to ICE field offices Saturday evening, telling agents that arrests of people without criminal records, including collaterals, would continue^[2][4]. Trump told Fox that anyone in the country illegally stays "on the table"^[2]. No written copy of either the original guidance or the walk-back has been made public^[2][4].

So the record, as far as anyone has confirmed it, holds three things at once: guidance went out, officials called it wrong, and it got reversed within about a day^[2]. Who wrote the first version, and why, is still not public.

Two Numbers, Two Definitions of "Criminal"

Underneath the weekend confusion sits a bigger, older fight over who ICE is actually arresting. In late August, a Washington Post analysis found that nearly 40% of people ICE had detained since Trump returned to office had no criminal record — and that share passed half in July^[6][8]. Research group TRAC, based at Syracuse University, has put the no-conviction share of detainees at around 7 in 10^[9]. Researcher Austin Kocher calculated that 92% of the growth in ICE detention during fiscal 2026 came from people with no conviction^[10].

The White House answers with a different number: nearly 70% of the people ICE has arrested were convicted of or charged with a U.S. crime^[7]. It argues the "non-criminal" label hides people who are dangerous by other measures — DHS pointed to a Salvadoran man wanted for aggravated homicide in El Salvador whose only U.S. offense was driving without a license^[7]. The libertarian Cato Institute pushed back on the 70% figure directly, analyzing ICE's own booking data and finding that 47% of people booked into ICE custody hadn't been charged with any crime at all^[19].

Both sides' numbers can be accurate at the same time, because they're measuring different things. ICE data sorts people into three buckets — convicted, pending charges, or neither — and critics count that third bucket as "non-criminal." The White House counts convicted-or-charged together and argues that group alone is nearly 70% of arrests, while treating the rest as people with records abroad or other red flags^[7][9]. Neither side is lying about its own math; they're just using different denominators.

Why the Administration Can't Have Both Things It Wants

The tension driving all of this is structural, not personal. The administration wants very large deportation numbers, and it also wants to tell the public that enforcement is focused on dangerous people first^[2][6]. Those two goals pull against each other. Arresting only people with criminal records makes it much harder to hit high overall arrest totals, since a large share of removable people simply don't have one^[2][6].

That's the pressure that produced Friday night's guidance in the first place, whoever wrote it. It's also why it didn't survive contact with the base. ICE officers and hardline commentators saw the pullback as a step back toward Biden-era "priorities" rules they'd fought to end, and some officials described agents as angry when they got the order^[2][4][5]. Immigrant advocates and researchers see it from the other side: with limited officers and detention beds, every collateral arrest of a settled worker or parent is time not spent on someone actually dangerous, so a "worst first" rule reads to them as basic resource management rather than leniency^[6][16].

How the Story Split Along Predictable Lines

Coverage of the weekend broke down largely along the lines you'd expect. The Daily Wire's original story attributed its claim carefully to officers, even as hardline outlets ran further with it — The Gateway Pundit's headline invoked "Total Confusion at ICE," casting the episode as internal disorder that Trump then had to correct^[1][13]. Fox News had the most sourced account, with Trump and nine officials on record, but its headline led with Trump's reassurance and used the softer word "confusing," leaving open who actually issued the order^[2].

Left-leaning outlets like Raw Story described the guidance as coming from an "internal memo," a term that implies a written document that, as of this writing, nobody has produced — sources described it as verbal^[2][12]. Turkish state-linked outlets TRT World and A News led their headlines with the original claim that officers were "instructed to halt" arrests, placing DHS's denial and the same-day reversal further down the story, and adding that the report came about a week after an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man in Texas^[14][15].

What's still missing from the public record is simple: nobody has said, on the record, who wrote the Friday night guidance or why. Until that surfaces, the episode will keep being read three different ways — a bureaucratic slip, an internal power struggle, or evidence of a policy fight that hasn't actually been settled.