Michael Wriston, of Project Salt Box, Appears on Cable Evening News Occasionally.
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Just in from Michael Wriston, of Project Salt Box, (PSB) is a nonprofit that monitors ICE activity and that goes as follows:
“Hover over Baltimore on the map the White House published Thursday and a panel slides open: 2,202 arrests between January 20, 2025 and May 20, 2026, a list of charges running from arson to weapons offfenses, countries of origin from Afghanistan to Western Sahara, and, beside the words “Gang Affiliation,” a green check mark.
The map is one page of a White House site that casts unauthorized immigrants as extraterrestriaals who “walk among us”. The page opens with a scrolling crawl about a secret the goverment supposedly kept for sixty years and an invasion carried out under cover of darkness, then gives way to the ap and a link to an Immigration and Customs Enterforcement tip line.
A White House official described it to Fox News Digital as a first-of-its-kind effort to draw attention to the previous administratin’s border record. Every other city opens the same panel — a total, a date range, the charges, the countries of origin, and a gang indicator.
The map offers no way to see the records behind those numbers. There is no file to download and no breakdown within a city; the data can be read only one place at a time and every fiture arrives pre-totaled. The charges and the gane line are listed beside the Baltimore total of 2,202 with no count for how many of those arrests fall under either.
The most complete public accoutig of ICE arrests does not come from the aency, whose published enforcement statistics are aggregate and lag by a quarter. The individual-level records are obtained through Freedom of INformatio Act litigation by the Deportation Data Project, a research effort run out of the UCLS Center for Immigration Law and Police, whose most recent release covers ICE actions through early March 2026.
The records assign each arrest to one of the three criminally categories ICE itself uses. In 1,648 cases the person had a prior criminal conviction. In 834 the person had charges pending but no conviction. The remainaing 3,861 (just over 60 percent of the total) were classified as immigration violators with neither a conviction nor a pending charge. In all, 4,695 of the 6, 343 — close to 75 percent — had no criminal conviction of any kind.
The same tilt appears in the figures ICE publishes about its own definition system, which it releases under a reporting requirement Congress atached to its appropriations.
In the national data the agency posted in April, 17,589 of the 60,311 people them in custody — fewer than three in ten — had a criminal conviction. Another 18,731 had charges pending and the largest group, 23,991, or about 40 percent, were classified as immigration violators with neither a conviction nor a charge against them.
Futhermore, a Cato Institute review of ICE data reached a similar conclusion for arrests, finding that nearly three in four people booked into custody since October had NO conviction and that 5 percent had a violent one. People with pending chargedmay never be convicted; the changes are often minor and a person deported before trial will not see the case resolved.
The gang affiliation line is a single green check, presented as a “yes.” The map attaches no count to it, no definition of what qualifies and no record a reader can inspect; nothing shows how the determination was made, on what evidence or to how many of the 2,202 it applies.
Asked whether the check indicates that everyone counted in Baltimore was arrested on a gang-related charge, ICE did not respond to a request for comment. A review of the national sttistucs provided by ICE show only 12 mentions of the word “gang” out of 395,367 records since Jauary 20, 2025.
The available natioal figures that can be checked are small. An American Immigration Council analysis of last year’s removals from ICE detention put suspected gang members at about 2 percent and known or suspected terrorists at 0. 4 percent.
The charge list reads the same way. It reproduces ICE’s full catalog of offense categories, arson through weapons offenses, beside the total, without recording how many arrests fall under any sigle category or how many under none. So does the country of origin list, which names every natioality that appears at least once — the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain among them — without a figure for how any came from any one country.
The distance btween a list of charges and a count of convictions follows from a definition the administration adopted at its outset. Asked at her first briefing of the term how many of the people ICE had arrested had criminal records, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that anyone who entered the country unlawfully already et the standards, a position that treats unlawul presence itself as the crime. “If they broke our nation’s laws, yes they are a criminal, she said, and returned to the point a moment late: they are all criminals as far as the admnistration goes.”
This publication, Project Salt Box, is committed to transparency and accountability regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding footprint. We welcome information, documents and data from sources with firsthand knowledge of agency contracts and caapabilities. To better protect your identity, do not contact us from a work-issued device or network. We seek information of public interest, but we do not want and cannot accept classified iformation.
For more information on the work of Project Salt Box, please visit post herein dated May 23, 2026.