ICE said ‘Worst of the Worst’ were on streets. Many were already in jail.
Juan Bautista Franco belonged to an international crew of drug traffickers that, sometime in 2018, was found on a boat racing toward the U.S. shoreline with approximately 800 kilograms of cocaine.
According to sentencing documents, Bautista Franco began the journey in his native Ecuador. He and two others flitted up the Pacific Ocean until they were off the Mexican coast. Once there, they loaded their cargo onto a Mexican powerboat, sank their original vessel, and sped northward.
But a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter intercepted the boat, shooting out its engines. Bautista Franco wound up being tried in Tampa’s federal courthouse, and was sentenced in November 2018 to roughly 10 years in prison with credit for time served.
His name improbably resurfaced last December, in a Trump administration list of “criminal aliens” apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, titled ‘Worst of the Worst’ and published online, said the Ecuadoran drug trafficker was arrested by ICE in Atlanta.
“This new Worst of the Worst webpage allows every American to see for themselves the criminal illegal aliens that we are arresting, what crimes they committed, and what communities we removed them from. This is all about transparency and showing results,” Tricia McLaughlin, then assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said upon the list’s publication in December.
“Americans don’t have to rely on the press for this information — with this transparent tool, they can see for themselves what public safety threats were lurking in their neighborhoods and communities.”
But Bautista Franco was never a free man in Atlanta, and was never arrested here. He was serving time in the Atlanta federal prison, and would have been handed to ICE and deported as a matter of routine upon completion of his sentence, immigration experts say. That occurred Nov. 18, 2025.
And there are more names on the Trump administration’s list with similar situations.
As of late January, the ‘Worst of the Worst’ database included the names of 193 people allegedly apprehended by ICE in Atlanta. Of those, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was able to identify 56 federal prisoners who were already in custody when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, following arrests by law enforcement agencies outside of Georgia. As federal prisoners, those 56 individuals were, like Bautista Franco, likely held at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
The release of federal inmates to ICE is a feature of the longstanding collaboration between the Bureau of Prisons and immigration authorities, said Sarah Owings, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney.
“It’s absolutely nothing new,” Owings said. “There’s no question somebody in federal custody was going to get rolled straight to immigration when they got out of custody for a criminal sentence. And that’s how our system is supposed to function, and it’s how it works and how it has worked.”
DHS officials did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to Bautista Franco, at least four other federal prisoners were picked up by ICE in Atlanta over crimes committed outside the country. Others were imprisoned following convictions in 17 other U.S. states, from California to New York, Massachusetts to Texas.
And there are other issues that call into question the accuracy of the ICE list.
In its announcement unveiling the “Worst of the Worst” list, the Trump administration highlighted immigrants’ “criminal histories that include homicide, assault, rape, drug trafficking, child molestation, cruelty towards a child, battery, and armed robbery.”
But the alleged offenses of many of the immigrants apprehended by ICE in Atlanta seem to fall short of those serious offenses.
The only crime listed in connection to Thailand’s Vutha Keo, for instance, is marijuana possession. Rodolfo Martinez Mora, a Mexican national, has one offense detailed by DHS: disorderly conduct. Other non-violent, non-drug-related offenses that pop up in the database include property crimes, missed court dates, forgery and trespassing.
Four immigrants (one from Honduras, one from Guatemala, and two from Mexico) were included over the charge of illegal reentry — which applies to deported individuals who attempt to come back to the U.S. without authorization, and typically triggers two years in jail.
The AJC found federal court records for three of the four names listed. All three were arrested during the Biden presidency.
In other cases, arrest records reviewed by the AJC do not exactly match the charges listed on the ‘Worst of the Worst’ database, which does not include evidence or documentation of the crimes it says immigrants committed.
Dr. Thaddeus Johnson, a former police commander in Memphis, Tennessee, and an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University, said the list should be viewed skeptically at least in part because of the “intense political pressure” DHS is under to tout arrests and deportations of dangerous immigrants.
“The list maybe tells us something about how DHS wants the public to see its work, but it doesn’t give us a reliable or neutral picture of who ICE is arresting.”
Included in DHS’ list are some people with criminal convictions who were taken off the streets by ICE. Hossei Sharifi, for instance, was arrested by ICE last September. The Iranian national was sentenced to state prison in 2014 following convictions for child molestation, statutory rape and other charges. His incarceration ended in 2019. His crimes had been committed in Fulton County.
Immigrants in the crosshairs
Georgia immigrant crime exploded onto the national scene in 2024 when Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan national who had entered the country illegally, murdered 22-year-old Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia.
Riley’s violent death became a flashpoint in the debate over illegal immigration, and led to toughening immigration policy at both the state and federal levels.
But for years, academic research has suggested that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. That finding was backed up last year in a study from the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, which analyzed data from Georgia prisons and found that the incarceration rate of unauthorized immigrants lagged behind that of the rest of the state’s population.
“The federal government rightly seeks to exclude criminal illegal immigrants from the United States and remove those who commit crimes here. However, the good news is that illegal immigrants have a significantly lower crime rate than native-born Americans,” the report’s author wrote.
In the first nine months of Trump’s second term, just under one third of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Georgia were convicted criminals, records show.
Trump administration officials described the people on its “Worst of the Worst” database as active public safety threats taken out of American neighborhoods by immigration authorities. The list includes the U.S. cities in which the immigrants were picked up by ICE.
That can be misleading when it comes to federal prisoners, Johnson said, because it is common for them to be sentenced to prisons far away from the crime site. Prison placement is based on a variety of mostly logistical factors, as evaluated by the federal correctional system.
“It depends on the amount of available bed space. Another thing is the security levels of these particular facilities,” Johnson said. “The feds work a little bit differently from, you know, state and local government. The whole United States is its jurisdiction.”
So the list can be misleading, he said, “to voters, if they think it’s a clean census of dangerous offenders in a given metro area, right? It can create an exaggerated fear of crime.”
-Lois Norder contributed to this report
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