Trump’s Big Statistic About Migrant Murderers Is a Total Lie
Donald Trump has recently made a habit of claiming that more 13,000 undocumented migrants who had been convicted of murder were roaming free throughout the United States. The former president blasted the figure out at multiple campaign rallies in the critical swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and again Monday morning in an interview with Hugh Hewitt. “They’ve been set free into the United States of America,” Trump said in Wisconsin. “They are free to kill again. Oh, they’ll kill. These are killers.”
The statistic is completely bogus.
Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a letter responding to a request for data on “the number of noncitizens on ICE’s docket convicted or charged with a crime.” The letter included a table showing detention figures for various criminal offenses and showed that there were 13,099 “non-detained” migrants convicted of homicide.
What the letter did not include was an explanation of what it meant for a migrant to be “non-detained,” an ambiguity the Trump campaign seized upon to stoke fear of criminal migrants. According to a Monday report from the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank — the majority of “non-detained” migrants convicted of homicide are in custody, just not by ICE.
According to the Congressional Research Service, “ICE’s non-detained docket currently has approximately 3 million cases,” and “all aliens in the non-detained docket are awaiting a decision on whether they should be removed from the United States.” The detained docket — or those currently in ICE custody — represents those who are either awaiting their initial hearings upon arriving in the U.S., are awaiting transfer, or have had their immigration cases adjudicated and are being deported.
ICE notes that the non-detained docket “also includes aliens in state or federal law enforcement custody and at-large aliens with final orders of removal (e.g., fugitives),” which means many of them are behind bars. The agency adds that “detention is mandatory for certain classes of aliens (e.g., those convicted of specified crimes) with no possibility of release except in limited circumstances.” Usually, a migrant convicted of such a crime will be deported once their sentence is complete, however — in limited circumstances — they may be released back into the United States if a repatriation agreement does not exist with their nation of origin.
The bottom line is that ICE and the Biden administration aren’t releasing convicted murderers from federal custody.
The Cato Institute notes that the Biden administration has significantly reduced the number of criminal migrants released from immigration enforcement custody. Data reviewed by the organization also shows that the homicide convictions included in ICE’s figures span over four decades. Many migrants detained on charges of homicide in the United States actually committed the alleged crime outside of the country but were apprehended by U.S. officials. “If there really were 13,099 migrants convicted for domestic homicides in 2023, then they would have accounted for about 99 percent of all homicide convictions in the U.S. last year despite being about four percent of the population,” Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh writes. “That is obviously not the case because no group of people is criminally overrepresented by a factor of 25 above their share of the population.”
Trump and Republicans have focused much of their campaign energy and resources on concocting a myth that undocumented migrants are behind a mythical “migrants crime wave” that is terrorizing American cities. Time and time again, however, actual data shows that migrants — documented or undocumented — are significantly less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
On Monday, Trump cited the statistic about 13,000 migrant murderers loose in the U.S. during an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, alleging that the migrant murderers have “bad genes.”
“How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murders, Trump said. “You know now a murder — it’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
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