The Truth About Illegal-Alien Criminality

Do illegal aliens actually commit fewer crimes than do legal American citizens?

March 4, 2024

By John Perazzo

Reprinted from FrontPageMag

This past December, U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) personnel encountered 301,983 aliens who had crossed America’s unprotected southern border unlawfully. That astonishing, unprecedented figure pushed the total number of illegals who had entered U.S. territory during 2023 to roughly 2.54 million. If we include also the estimated 840,000 so-called “got-aways” known to have slipped into the American interior, the total jumps to about 3.4 million. That is more than the populations of all the cities in America except New York and Los Angeles, and more than the populations of 22 separate U.S. states – all in just a single year.

These figures stand in stark contrast to those of 2020, the final year of the Trump administration, when the corresponding numbers were 516,908 illegal-alien encounters with border authorities, plus another 119,000 “got-aways,” for a combined total of just under 636,000 unlawful intruders – scarcely 18.7 percent of the 2023 total.

Democrat defenders of open-borders immigration policies and their allies in the media have long claimed that illegal aliens make wonderful neighbors who, per capita, commit significantly fewer crimes against persons and property than do native-born American citizens. President Biden’s campaign co-chair Rep. Veronica Escobar, for example, repeated this mantra as recently as Friday on CNN Newsroom, in reaction to the high-profile murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, allegedly by a Venezuelan national living illegally in the United States.

But common sense alone should tell us that people who blithely ignore American immigration laws are likely to disrespect federal, state and local laws as well. Indeed, as Ronald Mortensen  pointed out in The Hill, “virtually all adult, illegal aliens commit felonies” such as forgery, fraud, identity theft, and perjury, “to procure the documents they need to get jobs, to drive and to obtain other benefits that are restricted to U.S. citizens.” These documents include Social Security cards, drivers’ licenses, green cards, birth certificates, and I-9 forms, among others.

The crimes of illegal aliens also include a multitude of violent, bloody, highly destructive offenses. And this is by no means a new phenomenon. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens who had “entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003.” Those 55,322 illegals had been arrested 459,614 times — an average of 8.3 arrests apiece — and had committed almost 700,000 separate criminal offenses, or roughly 12.7 offenses each. Approximately 12 percent of their arrests were for violent crimes such as homicide, robbery, assault, and sex-related offenses; 15 percent were for property offenses like burglary, larceny, theft, and vandalism; 24 percent were for drug crimes; and the rest were for a wide array of transgressions like DUI, fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, weapons violations, immigration crimes, and obstruction of justice.

Between 2003 and 2009, illegals in the U.S. committed approximately 70,000 sex crimes, 42,000 robberies, 81,000 auto thefts, 95,000 weapons offenses, and 213,000 assaults. During that same period, some 115,717 murders were committed nationwide, of which 25,064 were carried out by “criminal aliens.”

In 2009, a total of 295,959 criminal aliens were incarcerated in state jails and prisons across the United States. Approximately 227,600 of them – or 77 percent — were in the U.S. illegally. And the crimes they committed were very often serious. Consider, for instance, the following crime statistics for five particular states with large illegal-alien populations. Setting aside traffic offenses:

• 41 percent of all illegal-alien convictions in Arizona were for drug crimes and assault;

• about half of such convictions in California and Texas were for drugs, assault, and sex offenses;
• roughly 50 percent of such convictions were for drug offenses, sex crimes, burglary, and robbery; and
• in New York, 23 percent were for drug-related offenses, while an astonishing 27 percent were for homicide.

The border state Texas has been hit particularly hard by the criminal behavior of illegal aliens. According to an analysis conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), 177,588 unique foreign-criminal-alien defendants were booked into Texas county jails between October 2008 and April 2014. Their crimes included at least 611,234 offenses, among which were 2,993 homicides and 7,695 sexual assaults. Between June 1, 2011, and November 30, 2021, some 356,000 criminal aliens were booked into Texas jails. More than 243,000 of them – or 68 percent — were in the United States illegally.

Between 2012 and 2019, approximately 3.2375 of every 100,000 illegal aliens in Texas were convicted of homicide — a figure 29% higher than the rate among the overall Texas population. Even more strikingly, 19.125 of every 100,000 illegals in Texas were convicted of sexual assault during that same time frame – about double the 9.85 rate among all Texas residents. In 2014, illegal aliens in Texas were arrested for murder at a rate 56 percent higher than the rate for all other apprehended murderers statewide.

Also in 2014, illegal aliens – an estimated 3.5 percent of the U.S. population — accounted for 74.1 percent of all federal drug sentences nationwide, according to data from the United States Sentencing Commission, as well as 20 percent of the country’s kidnapping/hostage-taking sentences, 12 percent of its murder sentences, 19.4 percent of its national-defense related sentences, and 36.7 percent of federal crime sentences overall.

Between 2008 and 2014, criminal aliens were responsible for 38 percent of all murder convictions in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, though illegals were only 5.6% of the total population in those states.

In May 2016, Fox News reported that “a wildly disproportionate number of murderers, rapists and drug dealers are crossing into the U.S.” Most notably, illegals accounted for 13.6 percent of those who had been sentenced for all crimes committed nationwide in recent years, as well as 12 percent of those sentenced for murder, 20 percent of those sentenced for kidnapping, and 16 percent of those sentenced for drug trafficking.

A July 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that:

• Between 2011 and 2016, criminal aliens accounted for anywhere between 21 and 25 percent of America’s federal inmate population.
• Between 2010 and 2015, state and local detention facilities across the U.S. housed some 533,000 criminal aliens who had been arrested approximately 3.5 million times for 5.5 million offenses including more than 1 million drug crimes, 500,000 assaults, 133,000 sex crimes, 24,000 kidnappings, 33,300 homicide-related offenses, and 1,500 crimes related to terrorism.

In a 2018 study of inmates who had been housed in Arizona state prisons since 1985, John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, concluded that:

Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, [are] more likely to be classified as dangerous, and [are] 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens [are].… [Y]oung undocumented immigrants commit crime at twice the rate of young U.S. citizens. These undocumented immigrants also tend to commit more serious crimes.

In a study released in 2019, the Federation for American Immigration Reform examined the rate at which criminal illegal aliens were incarcerated in state and local correctional facilities in ten U.S. states whose illegal populations accounted for 65 percent of all illegals nationwide. In one of those states, Arizona, the average illegal alien was statistically 301% more likely to be incarcerated than the average legal immigrant residing there. In the other 9 states, the average illegal alien was:

• 231% more likely to be incarcerated than the average legal immigrant in California
• 78% more likely in Florida
• 161% more likely in Nevada
• 440% more likely in New Jersey
• 42% more likely in New Mexico
• 187% more likely in New York
• 267% more likely in Oregon
• 60% more likely in Texas
• 248% more likely in Washington

In December 2021, the U.S. Department Of Justice (DOJ) reported that of the roughly 41,000+ criminal aliens who had been prosecuted in federal courts nationwide in 2018, the vast majority—about 38,000—were in the United States illegally.

In October 2020, The Hill stated that according to the Department of Homeland Security’s most recent Alien Incarceration Report, fully “94 percent of confirmed aliens” who were imprisoned at the federal level were “unlawfully present in the United States.”

As of early January 2024, at least 617,607 aliens on the non-detained docket of the Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) had either already been convicted of specific crimes, or were facing pending criminal charges.

The Myth of the Law-Abiding Illegal Alien

Democrat claims that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than do native-born Americans are invariably based on the findings of studies that either: (a) intentionally manipulate data to support a deceptive narrative, or (b) fail to take into account key information that would yield a very different conclusion.

For example, many studies of the relationship between immigrants and crime fail to distinguish between illegal aliens and their legal immigrant counterparts. Instead, they conflate the two and categorize them generically as “immigrants.” And crime calculations omit millions of offenses illegal aliens commit each year to procure fraudulent identity documents, or they omit broad categories of other offenses, like drug crimes.

Yet another major flaw in studies is their failure to take into account the fact that many criminal offenders who are illegal aliens are unrecognized as such at the time of their arrest, often categorized as people of “other” or “unknown” immigration status.

A Massive Threat to Innocent Lives and National Security

Every statistic about illegal immigrant crime represents a real victim whose life may be permanently ruined, if not ended altogether, by people possessing no legal right to even set foot on American soil.

Consider, for instance, the tragic fate of autistic twenty-year-old Kayla Hamilton, who in July 2022 was attacked by an illegal alien from El Salvador who entered her bedroom, raped her, robbed her of six dollars, and then strangled her to death with an electrical cord. The perpetrator, an MS-13 gang member, had crossed the nation’s unprotected southern border two months earlier by posing as an Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC).

Consider also what occurred on January 30, 2024: Alonzo Pierre Mingo, a 37-year-old alien who previously had been in ICE custody, impersonated a package-delivery man to trick his way into a Minneapolis home where he demanded money and then fatally shot three adults in the head while two small children were present.

Such anecdotes represent the smallest tip of a gargantuan iceberg of illegal-alien crime. Moreover, the dangers posed by illegals extend also into the realm of potentially catastrophic terrorist threats. Indeed, according to CBP data, Border Patrol agents in 2022-2023 apprehended no fewer than 270 illegal aliens whose names were already on America’s terrorist watchlist. By contrast, a mere 30 such encounters had occurred during the four fiscal years from 2017 through 2021, combined.

Another major concern is the fact that among those entering the United States illegally are massive numbers of people hailing from enemy nations openly hostile to America:

• CBP reports that 37,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023 – 50 times more than the corresponding figure from 2021.
• From January through November of 2023, more than 262,000 Venezuelans likewise entered the U.S. illegally.
• On October 10, 2023, Fox News reported: “[B]etween October 2021 and October 2023, [Border Patrol] agents encountered 6,386 nationals from Afghanistan … as well as 3,153 from Egypt, 659 from Iran, and 538 from Syria. Agents also encountered 13,624 from Uzbekistan, 30,830 from Turkey, 1,613 from Pakistan, 164 from Lebanon, 185 from Jordan, 139 from Yemen, 123 from Iraq, and 15,594 from Mauritania.”

Yet another major threat stemming from the Biden administration’s obliteration of our southern border is the scourge of illicit drugs. In 2021, for instance, more than 106,000 Americans nationwide died of drug overdoses, including at least 70,601 from synthetic opioids other than methadone – mainly fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Indeed, fentanyl has now become the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, and the vast majority of it is smuggled over our border with Mexico.

It should be noted, however, that the fentanyl crisis in America is even more closely related to Communist China than to Mexico. As bestselling author Peter Schweizer points out: “A lot of the people involved in the fentanyl trade actually have senior positions in the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] or they’re advisers to the CCP government, [and] the links in this chain of fentanyl that is poisoning 100,000 Americans, every link in that chain is a Chinese operation.”

The reckless, open-borders policies of the Biden administration have left America more vulnerable than ever before to agents of violence, destruction, and sabotage. As a Homeland Security official recently told the Daily Caller News Foundation: “The border is open. Wide open. Don’t believe the media. Don’t believe the [Biden] White House. Arm yourself, protect your homes and your families, because this joke of an administration isn’t doing anything.”