Claim by DHS and Social Media:
Following a Department of Homeland Security press release, claims spread widely that sanctuary policies in New York allowed nearly 7,000 “criminal illegal aliens” to go free — implying that undocumented immigrants commit disproportionately high levels of violent crime.
Explanation:
The claim misleads by conflating arrest data with crime rates. DHS stated that New York released nearly 7,000 individuals with active ICE detainers in 2025, including people charged with homicide, assault, weapons, or sexual offenses. However, these figures reflect charges and detainer requests, not convictions or overall immigrant crime rates.
Federal-level data paints a much different picture. According to the Criminal Alien Statistics database, most noncitizen federal convictions involve immigration-related offenses such as illegal entry or reentry, with far fewer convictions for violent crimes.
Independent analyses consistently contradict claims of high immigrant criminality. The right-leaning CATO Institute found that in 2023, native-born Americans were incarcerated at a rate of 1,221 per 100,000, compared to 613 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants and 319 per 100,000 for legal immigrants. Similar findings in Texas and Georgia, the only states that track immigration status in crime records, showed illegal immigrants had lower conviction and arrest rates than native-born citizens.
Conclusion:
Fact or Fiction? Fiction. Federal and state data show that both legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Claims citing isolated DHS detainer statistics misrepresent the broader evidence on immigrant crime rates.
Read More
Do you appreciate our work? Please consider one of the following ways to sustain us.
or
