735 Arrests, 1,711 Convictions, One City, One Month. Inside ICE’s Summer Surge.
In a single May, ICE’s Houston field office arrested 735 criminal illegal aliens. Between them, those 735 people carried 1,711 criminal convictions — including five homicides, one attempted capital murder of a police officer, 38 sex offenses, and 495 drunk-driving convictions. ICE says roughly 70 percent of those convictions were for violent or public-safety crimes.
ICE released the numbers, it said, not because May stood out but because it didn’t — a snapshot of “who we’re arresting every single month.” Nationally, the Department of Homeland Security says it has removed or returned nearly 900,000 illegal aliens since January 20, 2025; its “Worst of the Worst” removals ran all through June; and on a Virginia interstate, agents pulled over a Brazilian national driving an 18-wheeler on a Massachusetts driver’s license with no commercial license at all.
This is one page on three ICE press releases — the Houston recap, the June removals, and the trucker — and the record they lay out. Where a case is a conviction, we say so. Where it is only an arrest or a pending charge, we say that too. The 1,711 Houston convictions are adjudicated fact; the trucker and the handful of context cases are unresolved, and the presumption of innocence applies to them.
- 735arrestscriminal illegal aliens ICE Houston arrested in May 2026 — ICE, June 22, 2026
- 1,711convictionscriminal convictions those 735 arrestees carried between them — ICE Houston release
- ~1,18270%of the convictions were for violent or public-safety offenses — ICE
- 495DWIsdrunk-driving convictions in that one city-month cohort alone — ICE Houston release
- ~900Kremovedillegal aliens removed or returned nationally since Jan. 20, 2025 — ICE ERO EAD Marcos Charles
In May 2026, ICE’s Houston Enforcement and Removal Operations office — which covers 58 counties across southeast Texas — arrested 735 criminal illegal aliens. Between them, those 735 people carried 1,711 criminal convictions. Six hundred twenty-five of them had at least one prior offense that ICE describes as having killed, harmed, or endangered an American. Roughly 1,182 of the convictions — about 70 percent — were for violent or public-safety crimes. Twenty-five were gang members or associates of MS-13, Surenos 13, the 18th Street gang, Tango Blast, Paisas, and others. On top of the 735, more than 200 additional arrestees had criminal charges still pending.
The conviction breakdown is where the abstraction becomes concrete. In one city, in one month, the cohort ICE arrested had been convicted of five homicides and one attempted capital murder of a police officer; 38 sex offenses, 13 of them against children; 12 sex-trafficking offenses; 224 counts of aggravated assault, assault, or battery; 170 burglaries, robberies, and thefts; 23 domestic-violence offenses; three kidnappings; and 495 drunk-driving convictions — a category so deep that three of the men had six DWI convictions each, two had five, and 47 had three. These are not charges. They are convictions already on the books when ICE made the arrest.
735 criminal illegal aliens arrested; 1,711 criminal convictions between them.
625 had at least one prior offense ICE says killed, harmed, or endangered an American.
~1,182 (70%) of the convictions were violent or public-safety offenses; 25 were gang members or associates.
Included: 5 homicides · 1 attempted capital murder of a police officer · 38 sex offenses (13 against children) · 224 assault/battery counts · 495 DWIs · plus 200+ arrestees with charges still pending.
“We're releasing this data not because it stands out from any other month, but because this is a snapshot of who we're arresting every single month.”
Gabriel Martinez · ICE ERO acting Field Office Director, Houston · June 22, 2026
And Houston did not slow down. In June — the month after this cohort was announced — ICE’s Houston-area operations arrested 1,361 criminal aliens, nearly double May’s figure, according to Texas Scorecard. The 735 was not a ceiling. It was a floor.
Homeland Security Investigations and ERO Houston say their teams are 'making a real impact' as DHS spotlights the worst-of-the-worst criminal aliens arrested by ICE across the Houston area.
ICE named individual cases from the Houston cohort, and the through-line is recidivism — men deported before, who came back and offended again. Because the presumption of innocence is not a slogan on this page, the conviction and arrest language below tracks ICE’s own release exactly.
Dinh Quy Nguyen, 56, of Vietnam, was convicted of attempted capital murder of a police officer and burglary; ICE arrested him May 5 and holds him pending removal. Javier Moya-Tentory, 41, of Mexico — previously deported twice — was convicted of homicide, arrested May 26, and deported June 5. Arturo Cruz-Badillo, 44, of Mexico, had been deported five times; he carried convictions for five DWIs, illegal reentry, and battery, and was removed again on May 13. Jose Olban Martinez, 32, of Honduras — twice deported — was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14 and illegal entry, and was deported May 20. Alonso Rafael Barrera-De Leon, 41, of Mexico, an admitted Paisas member who had entered the country illegally 12 times, was convicted of drug trafficking, theft, and drug possession.
One case demands careful language. Juan Esteban Zelaya Hernandez, 43, of Honduras, deported four times, was convicted of arson, battery, criminal mischief, and property damage — and was separately arrested for, but not convicted of, homicide and unlawful weapon possession. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence on the homicide allegation; the arson and battery are convictions of record. ICE’s companion national release for the week ending June 12 named more of the same profile: Jose Miguel Chavarria-Cruz, a Surenos 13 member convicted of second-degree murder and aggravated robbery; Pedro Antonio Luna, convicted of sexual assault of a minor relative; and Francis Polycarpe of the Bahamas, convicted in a 2018 Nebraska attempted-sexual-assault case involving a child after overstaying a visitor visa since 2001.
Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, ICE is going after the worst of the worst — DHS says nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the United States, and points to sex criminals and violent offenders removed from American communities.
The third release is different in kind, and the distinction is the whole point. On May 27, 2026, Homeland Security Investigations agents out of Harrisonburg stopped an 18-wheeler on Interstate 81 in Virginia and administratively arrested the driver, Lins Dos Santos-Melo, a Brazilian national. This was a civil immigration arrest, not a criminal charge. Dos Santos-Melo has not been convicted of a crime, and he is not a “criminal alien” — he is an alien alleged to be in the country unlawfully and now in removal proceedings. He is presumed innocent, and we say so plainly.
What makes the case a story is the paperwork he did have. Dos Santos-Melo held a valid Massachusetts driver’s license— issued to him regardless of immigration status — but no commercial driver’s license for the tractor-trailer combination he was operating. In ICE’s framing, a man with no legal basis to be in the country was moving a 40-ton vehicle down an interstate without the federally required qualification to drive it.
“When someone gets behind the wheel of a vehicle this size without the training and qualifications required by law, they're putting every family sharing that roadway at risk.”
David J. Venturella · acting ICE Director · June 17, 2026
The concern is not hypothetical. ICE has separately arrested drivers in fatal cases — Rajinder Kumar, charged in an Oregon crash that killed newlyweds William Micah Carter and Jennifer Lynn Lower, and Bekzhan Beishekeev, accused in an Indiana crash that killed four. Both of those are pending cases, and both men are presumed innocent; we cite them as the risk category ICE is invoking, not as proven parallels to Dos Santos-Melo, whose case involves no crash and no criminal charge at all.
ICE’s trucker release does something its enforcement releases usually don’t: it names a state policy. Dos Santos-Melo’s Massachusetts license was issued under the Work and Family Mobility Act, which lets residents obtain driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status. Precision matters here. That law was not a federal creation: the Massachusetts legislature passed it in June 2022 over the veto of then-Gov. Charlie Baker (R), and it took effect July 1, 2023 under Gov. Maura Healey (D). ICE’s release says the licensing regime took hold “under the Biden administration” — temporally accurate, but the policy is a Massachusetts state law, and that is how we describe it.
The federal counterweight is a rule from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (R) restricting non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses, which took effect March 16, 2026. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell (D), joined by the attorneys general of 18 other states and the District of Columbia, opposed that rule. That is the obstruction hook ICE is pointing at: a state that issues licenses regardless of status feeding into interstate freight corridors, while Democratic attorneys general fight the federal effort to tighten commercial licensing. The politics is a fact of the case, and so is the presumption of innocence for the man ICE stopped.
ICE officers are directed to deliver the single largest mass-deportation program in history and to expand efforts to detain and remove illegal aliens from America's largest cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York — which the President calls the core of the Democrat power center.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrasing President Trump's June 15, 2025 directive, as documented by TIME and NBC
Houston is a window onto a national operation running at a scale the country has not seen. ICE ERO Executive Associate Director Marcos Charles said the agency has removed or returned nearly 900,000 illegal aliens since January 20, 2025. Removal flights have roughly doubled: the Washington Examiner counted 296 removal flights in May 2026 alone — against 126 in the administration’s first full month — and about 3,000 chartered removal flights since inauguration day. Domestic ICE flights have climbed from roughly 250 a month in 2024 to more than 1,000 a month in 2026. In late June, the Associated Press reported, ICE arrested 10,000 people in five days, roughly 2,000 a day.
“We are running the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen. And despite what the left says, about 70% of those we arrest are criminals.”
Tom Homan · White House border czar · 2026
One number deserves a caveat. ICE and DHS repeatedly cite a figure that roughly 70 percent of the people ICE arrests have criminal histories — charged or convicted. That is ICE’s own measure of its arrests, and we present it as such. It is not the same statistic as the frequently cited counter-figure showing that a large share of the people in ICE detention lack criminal convictions; those two numbers use different denominators — arrests versus detained population — and answer different questions. Both can be true. On the Houston cohort specifically, the convictions are documented and not in dispute.
The buildout behind the numbers is enormous. DHS says it has expanded ICE’s manpower by 120 percent, with roughly 12,000 new hires, and Fox News reported a $38.3 billion detention expansion adding 92,600 beds. The White House said in February that more than 605,000 people had been removed and about 1.9 million had self-deported — 2.5 million total departures since January 2025. The direction of policy, at least, is not ambiguous.
It's October 3rd. A great day for deportations.
Throughout 2026, the President has repeatedly used Truth Social to tout the administration's deportation record and to press ICE to accelerate removals from Democrat-run cities.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Truth Social · paraphrasing President Trump's repeated 2026 posts touting the deportation record and pressing ICE to accelerate removals — not a single verbatim post
Strip away the framing on all sides and the documented core is narrow and hard. In one American city, in one month, ICE arrested 735 people who together carried 1,711 criminal convictions, including violent and sexual offenses and 495 drunk-driving convictions — many of them people who had been deported before and returned. Those are convictions, not allegations.
ICE’s Houston office arrested 735 criminal illegal aliens in a single month, carrying 1,711 convictions between them — a cohort ICE says is typical, not exceptional. Houston arrests then nearly doubled in June.
Nationally, DHS says it has removed or returned nearly 900,000 people since January 2025, with removal flights roughly doubled. ICE’s “70% criminal history” figure is a claim about its arrests; we cite it as ICE’s.
The Brazilian trucker stopped on I-81 was administratively arrested, not charged with a crime, and is presumed innocent. His case is a story because of the policy behind his license, not because of a conviction he does not have.
