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As ICE arrests continue to increase, a recent study finds that 48% of people ICE arrested in Northern California have no criminal record.

KRCB's Shandra Back sat down with data reporter Kelly Waldron, with Mission Local, a nonprofit news site based in San Francisco, to take a deeper look into the stats.

SHANDRA BACK: What's the biggest finding from this new ICE data?

WALDRON: In my most recent analysis, we looked at whether people who were arrested had a criminal background, and increasingly...this is a national trend, more people are being arrested who don't have any criminal background.

So whereas previously there would've been a, a larger share of, people arrested who have a criminal background or pending criminal charges.

For the first time in September, in the subset of data I was looking at, the number of people who had no criminal record who were arrested, surpassed the number of people who had a criminal conviction.

So what that tells us is that the federal administration is targeting a broader group of people.

It's not necessarily people who have...any kind of criminal record. They may just have some kind of immigration violation, which isn't considered a criminal violation.

We have several reporters, who over the summer and throughout the fall, have been going to the immigration courthouse in San Francisco and documenting arrests happening there. We wanted to see if there's a way we could quantify that or get a sense of how widespread these arrests were and whether they're increasing, more broadly outside of the places we're covering closely.

The biggest takeaway is that, on par with national trends, immigration arrests are increasing. They tripled, this year compared to the previous year for the data we have available, which covers most of this year from January to October.

BACK: And when you say the arrests have tripled, what does that mean in the context of Northern California?

WALDRON: This data looks at records from ICE, which is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. ICE publishes their data by ICE jurisdiction. These are special jurisdictions and they have different areas of responsibilities.

So the local jurisdiction for us in San Francisco, or anyone in Northern California, is a San Francisco area of responsibility that covers all of Northern California and some of the Pacific Islands, Hawaii and Guam and Saipan, and the information is really useful.

It is a little sparse on the location end. For example, there's no specific information about where arrests happened. So, when we're reading about arrests happening, raids happening at agricultural sites, or arrests at immigration courthouses, often there isn't a distinction or a way to tell where these arrests are happening. So it's covering any kind of arrest happening in the US that's not along the border.

BACK: The tripling of the arrests, would you say there are any limitations in how you found that data or things to keep an eye out for?

WALDRON: I would say the main limitation with that is that it's most certainly an under count because we're missing a lot of location information.

We've excluded records that don't specify a state. And on top of that, this doesn't include any arrests made by other agencies. So this is most certainly an under count, but this is the best estimate we have.