During his campaign, Donald Trump pledged sweeping deportations, vowing to remove what he repeatedly described as the “worst criminal illegal aliens.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s data offers a glimpse into the African nationals who fall under that category - individuals the agency labels as the “worst of the worst.”
Among African countries, the arrest figures are heavily concentrated in a small cluster of nations. Nigeria leads with 40 arrests, followed by Somalia (27) and Liberia (21), forming the highest tier. A second tier - Sudan, Kenya, DR Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Cape Verde, Eritrea, and Ethiopia - recorded between 9 and 18 arrests each. Most other African countries appear only sparingly, with three or fewer cases in the dataset. In total, only 37 African countries have available arrest data, and only those listed had at least three individuals flagged.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security explains that this category includes individuals already convicted of serious crimes as well as others facing pending criminal charges at the time they are encountered. In other words, not everyone in the dataset has been newly convicted in U.S. courts, but all are placed under DHS’s highest-severity tier because of their connection to major offenses such as murder, aggravated assault, sexual offenses, child exploitation, burglary, identity theft, robbery, drug related offences, fraud schemes, and weapons violations. These are the types of crimes DHS cites when identifying those considered the “worst of the worst
