From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, December 8th.

So have you asked yourself, what percentage of immigrants detained by ICE are the violent criminals who President Trump claims are his top priority?

Well, according to a Cato Institute review of deportation data from the first half of this year,

almost half of the people being detained don't even have criminal charges against them.

The numbers come originally from the deportation data project at the University of California at Berkeley. A New York Times

article last week about this data set focused specifically on New York stats, which indicates

similarly that through October, around 45% of detainees had no criminal convictions and no criminal charges. So let's take a

closer look at some of those numbers and their implications for innocent people's lives with

David Beard, Director of Immigration Studies and the Sales Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy

at the Libertarian Cato Institute think tank,

and we'll invite your questions and stories. David, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Thanks for having me on. So, David, the headline on your blog post about this from Cato begins

with the stat that only 5% of people detained by ICE have violent convictions.

Why do you start there? Well, this is the group of individuals that the administration has said that

they want to focus on. This is who they highlight. If you look at their social media,

you would think 100% of the people that they're detaining had violent criminal convictions,

because that is who they lead with in all of their social media, in all of their messaging,

their press events.

It always starts with, we are arresting the worst of the worst, and here's the examples of that.

And they start, you know, we have this many arrests, and then here are some of the people that we arrested.

And it's always the people with the most depraved

criminal histories you've ever heard of. And then there's just a total blackout of the 95% of the

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