When President Joe Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Riley as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics.
The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive issue of crime perpetrated and spawned by the influx of millions of migrants since President Biden was elected—often in ways that leave the migrants themselves as victims.
While migrant advocates argue that illegal arrivals commit crimes at lower rates than Americans, the claim is unverifiable because the federal government and most states do not break down crimes by immigration status.
Criminologists also note that it ignores the vast web of statutory crimes concurrent with illegal immigration—drug smuggling, human trafficking, child labor violations, prostitution, the black market in employment, and so on.
What remains undeniable by the law of averages is that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies—a surge that it puts at more than 4 million people but is millions more according to other sources—has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.
Millions of migrants, although not all, run afoul of laws by their situation more than by overtly malign criminal intent. But their first step across the border is a lawbreaking one, and it is often followed by life on the law’s margins: living in the United States without insurance or proper work papers, providing illicit labor for unscrupulous or blasé employers, turning to black markets for counterfeit Social Security cards, and often becoming targets for robbers or extortionists. Their desire to come to the United States creates a vast pool of criminality involving them or those illegally profiting from them.
“Some criminal groups view migrants as simply one of many commodities to be smuggled, alongside drugs and firearms,” it stated in a 2018 report. “Since the smuggling of migrants is a highly profitable illicit activity with a relatively low risk of detection, it is attractive to criminals.”
The United Nations also acknowledges the near impossibility of quantifying these criminal enterprises.
“Assessing the real size of this crime is a complex matter, owing to its underground nature and the difficulty of identifying when irregular migration is being facilitated by smugglers,” it stated.
In order to pay back these smugglers or the people willing to “host” them in the United States, many migrants—no one knows how many—are often dragooned into illicit behavior.
The federation advocates policies to seal the border from illegal penetrations.
“Going to work for the cartels is one way they can pay off their debts. Others may find themselves pressed into indentured servitude or, even worse, being trafficked in the sex trades,” he said.
Although they get little attention in the United States, the crimes associated with migration begin south of the border. Since President Biden sent a clear signal while running for president that he would welcome mass immigration, tens of thousands of people along the Central American isthmus have been inspired to migrate and have become victims too. Vulnerable and poor people making the more than 2,000-mile trek from the Darién Gap in Panama to the Texas border have been preyed upon physically and economically, contributing to the enormous human cost.
Criminologists have said that part of the problem in measuring migrant-related crime in the United States is “sanctuary” jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration agencies. Sanctuary enforcement is also not a category traditionally tracked by law enforcement agencies. Mr. Nowrasteh said that several years ago he sent Freedom of Information Act requests to all 50 states seeking data on crime committed by or on immigrants and only Texas offered a response. He said he believes that since then, Georgia has begun amassing statistics, but the state has not yet issued any public reports.
“As police enforcement wanes and immigration surges nearly a dozen brothels have [also] set up shop along Roosevelt Avenue near Junction Boulevard,” the article reads.
“The drug pushers are easy to spot: Unlike the users, they look healthy and wear clean clothes,” Leighton Woodhouse reported. “They’re almost universally young men, mostly Honduran (on the streets of San Francisco they’re called ‘Hondos’).”
Millions of migrants working for legal businesses are also breaking the law.
Such theft implicates many American citizens, who hire migrants with no such documents or who turn a blind eye to potentially stolen IDs.
Just two days before President Biden used the term “illegal” to describe Jose Antonio Ibarra, the 26-year-old suspected Venezuelan gang member accused of killing Laken Riley after entering the United States illegally in Texas in 2022, the Texas Department of Public Safety heralded the third anniversary of its “Operation Lone Star.” The figures offered a window into the law enforcement situation on what is something like Ground Zero of illegal immigration to the United States.
Disputed, and Elusive, Crime Stats
Despite all this, many immigration advocates continue to insist that immigrants tend to commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.“Relative to undocumented immigrants,” the study reports, “US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”
But not all experts agree. Jason Richwine and Steven Caramota of CIS have criticized the PNAS study for failing to take into account further discoveries made by Texas authorities.
“It is a misleading claim for several reasons,” they claimed. “First, studies claiming it as fact are inescapably flawed, because most cities and states do not keep or publish data on criminals’ immigration status, rendering suspect any conclusions drawn from what data is available.”
“People have been way too hasty to draw firm conclusions because it’s not clear that Texas’s [statistics] are definitive—it’s not,” he said. “More states should do what Texas does and Texas should be more transparent about what they’re doing.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from RCI about migrant crime, nor did the Texas Department of Public Safety. But the dispute underscores the truth, acknowledged by all sides, that the paucity of reliable information leaves the only certain conclusion that there is more crime, regardless of perpetrator, because of the influx of more than 7 million people in three years.
“With law enforcement agencies in some cases it is willful blindness because they refuse to cooperate in any meaningful way,” Mr. Mehlman said. “If they acknowledge the extent of the crime committed by illegal aliens, they would have to explain to the public why they continue to maintain sanctuary policies that shield criminal aliens.”
‘Intellectual Fraud’
The numbers are misleading for another reason, too. Border Patrol agents told RCI that most people coming across illegally give themselves up quickly, knowing that current policies will allow them to be released into the United States with an expectation they appear for a court date years later. But the border crossers looking to stay in the shadows are more likely to be those with criminal pasts or inclinations, meaning a higher percentage of them would be among the at least 1.6 million “gotaways” Customs and Border Protection estimates have entered the U.S. illegally since 2021.In fiscal 2023, it said in its most recent annual report, U.S. Enforcement and Removal Operations “removed 3,406 known or suspected gang members, an increase of 27.7 percent over FY2022, and 139 known or suspected terrorists, a 148.2 percent increase over FY2022.”
It elaborated: “ERO officials made 170,590 administrative arrests, representing a 19.5 percent increase in overall arrests from FY2022. Of the total arrests ICE conducted in FY2023, 43 percent of those arrested had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, up from 32.5 percent in FY2022.”
The House Committee on Homeland Security majority report in October said Border Patrol had “recorded 35,450 arrests of illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds, approximately 14,000 more total such arrests than the previous four fiscal years combined.”
Those apprehended with prior convictions had been found to have committed a wide range of crimes, including assault, battery, domestic violence, and sexual offenses, as well as driving under the influence, burglary, and theft, the report noted.
The committee’s Republican members were harshly critical of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s handling of immigration, and their report was one more reason Mr. Mayorkas was impeached in February.
“We have no idea if that would have changed anything, but he’s here illegally,” Laken Riley’s father, Jason, said on March 18. “That he might not have been here had we had secure borders.”
In the aftermath of Ms. Riley’s shocking abduction and killing, her parents and others were incredulous that a man with prior arrests since his illegal entry to the United States and alleged ties to Venezuelan criminal gangs was in the country at all. The Border Patrol Union laid the blame squarely on President Biden’s border policies.
Mr. Herrmann said such anguish is understandable and that trying to view the incidents dispassionately offers “nothing that will be satisfying to any victim.” Yet he said the same argument could be extended to other horrible murders—gun crimes, for instance, in which so often the lethal weapon was illegally obtained and possessed. The crime would never have happened, in other words, if laws had been properly observed.
But Mr. Bensman said he finds that logic unpersuasive. Because opening the border has been a deliberate, sustained policy of the Biden administration, it has introduced the criminal, rather than his tools, into the equation.
“You can’t compare ‘illegal crimes’ to crimes by illegals—it’s the wrong comparison because the second one is 100 percent preventable and unnecessary whereas we’re stuck, as it were, with U.S. crime,“ he said. ”The whole ‘they’re not as bad’ argument about illegal immigrants is an intellectual fraud, it’s giving them an escape hatch when here it’s clear: The perpetrator should have been deported.”