Trump amplifies cherry-picked US migrant crime data
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"JUST OUT: 13,000 people convicted of murder have crossed into our Country through Kamala Harris’ Open Border - NON DETAINED, NON CITIZEN, CONVICTED CRIMINALS!" Trump said in a September 27, 2024 post sharing a Fox News graphic on his Truth Social platform.
Similar claims have circulated on Facebook, TikTok, X, Threads and in online articles.
"Under the Biden-Harris administration, over 425,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions have been released into the U.S., including 13,099 convicted murderers, 15,811 convicted rapists, 425,431 total convicted criminals," says a September 28, 2024 Instagram post
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Republican lawmakers amplified the allegations as Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to devote more resources to "fix" the immigration system if elected to the White House in November. Conservatives have repeatedly accused the Biden administration of failing to control the US-Mexico border, while also spreading misinformation about migrants.
The latest claims stem from a September 25 letter Patrick Lechleitner, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sent to lawmakers in response to queries about the number of non-citizens with criminal records in the United States (archived here).
The letter says that from mid-May 2023 through the end of July 2024, the agency removed or returned more than 893,600 individuals. As of July 21, there were 662,566 non-citizens with criminal histories on ICE's dockets of detained and non-detained individuals.
"Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges," the letter says.
The vast majority of those migrants are not currently detained by ICE, according to Lechleitner's letter. The document also indicates 13,099 non-citizens with homicide convictions and 15,811 with sexual assault records are not in agency custody.
However, the numbers do not only represent those who entered and were released during the Biden administration.
"The data in this letter is being misinterpreted," a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said in a September 30 email.
"The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration."
A 2023 DHS report (archived here) indicates there were 405,786 convicted non-citizens on the "non-detained docket" as of June 5, 2021, some five months after Trump left office. A 2017 Inspector General's report estimated the number at 368,574 as of August 2016 (archived here).
'Overwhelmingly in prison'
The claims also lack context about the status of migrants with criminal records.
The DHS spokesperson said the figures shared online include "many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council (archived here) told AFP: "These are people who, primarily, have already been charged and convicted and served their time."
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, offered a similar analysis in a September 30 blog post (archived here).
"When ICE uses the term 'non-detained,' they mean not currently detained by ICE," Nowrasteh wrote.
"In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences. After they serve their sentences, the government transfers them onto ICE's docket for removal from the United States."
Nowrasteh added that some individuals cannot be deported because the United States has no or limited repatriation agreements with countries such as Iran, Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos. He said other nations, including Venezuela, "periodically suspend their agreements for political reasons, or the United States government suspends deportations because of civil disorder in the destination country."
Lechleitner of ICE said in his letter that the agency is "bound by statutory requirements not to release certain non-citizens from ICE custody during the pendency of removal proceedings."
AFP has fact-checked other claims about US politics here and migration here.
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