A new report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance argues that the White House's online immigration arrest tracker substantially undercounts Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in Ohio and contains data presentation issues that could mislead users about immigrants' criminal histories and where arrests occur.
The report compares data displayed on the White House's "Aliens" tracker with ICE arrest records released through the Freedom of Information Act and published by the Deportation Data Project.
According to the analysis, the White House tracker reports 2,832 arrests in Ohio between January 23, 2025, and May 28, 2026, while the FOIA dataset records 4,954 Ohio arrests through March 11, 2026—a shorter time period.
The authors say that amounts to an undercount of nearly 55%.
While the Ohio figures differ sharply, the report notes that the White House tracker underreports nationwide ICE arrests by only 0.05%, leading the authors to question whether arrest totals in other states may be overstated to produce a national total that more closely matches government data. They conclude that the website is "inaccurate and unreliable."
The report also argues that the tracker presents criminal charges in a way that may exaggerate the prevalence of serious offenses. Rather than indicating how many people were convicted of specific crimes, the website lists every charge associated with arrests in a locality without identifying how many individuals were linked to each offense or whether they had any criminal conviction at all.
According to the FOIA data analyzed by the group, 40.4% of those arrested in Ohio had no criminal record or pending charges, 31% had convictions and 28.6% had pending criminal charges. Fewer than 5% had a violent offense listed as their most serious conviction.
The analysis further contends that the tracker often attributes arrests to the locations of ICE field offices rather than where arrests actually occurred, inflating totals for smaller communities such as Westerville and Blue Ash while obscuring enforcement patterns elsewhere.
It also identifies what it describes as quality-control problems, including duplicate entries, misspellings, inconsistent place names and parsing errors. One example cited is a Youngstown entry that lists "Congress" as a criminal charge after an FBI offense category was incorrectly split by commas.
"The American people deserve truth from our government, not gaslighting," Ohio Immigrant Alliance Executive Director Lynn Tramonte said in a statement accompanying the report. "Our report reveals, in painstaking detail, why this government simply cannot be trusted."
