Are Crime Rates Higher Among Undocumented Immigrants Compared to U.S. Citizens?

Immigration enforcement policies often dominate political debates, but determining the true relationship between immigration status and criminal activity remains complex due to inconsistent data collection methods and conflicting statistical interpretations.

A recent Department of Homeland Security announcement sparked controversy when it reported that New York had released nearly 7,000 individuals with active Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers between January and early December 2023. According to DHS, these individuals had been charged with or convicted of 29 homicides, 2,509 assaults, 300 weapons offenses, and 207 sexual predatory offenses.

The report quickly became ammunition in the ongoing national debate over sanctuary policies, which limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. New York, like several other states and municipalities, has policies restricting when local authorities can honor ICE detainers—administrative requests to hold individuals for potential deportation proceedings.

However, immigration policy experts note that these statistics represent only a narrow slice of the larger picture. The DHS figures come from local and state arrest records where individuals happened to intersect with New York’s criminal justice system and were flagged for immigration issues—not from comprehensive data on immigrant crime rates overall.

Federal conviction data tells a markedly different story. When examining nationwide statistics on noncitizen convictions tracked by the Department of Homeland Security, illegal entry and re-entry emerge as the most common offenses, typically accounting for 8,000 to 10,000 cases annually. Driving under the influence ranks second, while drug and theft convictions number in the hundreds to low thousands each year.

This federal dataset has significant limitations, however, as it primarily captures federal offenses—which represent only a small fraction of all crimes—and excludes most criminal activity handled by state and local authorities.

For a more comprehensive view, the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, analyzed over a decade of data from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey. Their findings show that in 2023, native-born Americans had an incarceration rate of 1,221 per 100,000 people, while unauthorized immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 613 per 100,000, and legal immigrants at just 319 per 100,000.

According to CATO’s analysis, unauthorized immigrants are approximately half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, while legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates of all. These patterns have remained consistent in their data from 2010 through 2023.

Only two states—Texas and Georgia—systematically track immigration status in their criminal justice records, providing rare glimpses into state-level trends. Both states’ data align with CATO’s national findings: unauthorized immigrants in Texas had lower conviction and arrest rates than native-born residents, even for serious crimes like homicide. Similarly, Georgia’s records showed lower incarceration rates for unauthorized immigrants compared to U.S.-born residents.

The conflicting narratives emerging from different datasets highlight a significant challenge for policymakers and the public: the absence of standardized, comprehensive tracking of immigration status across all levels of the criminal justice system makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about immigration and crime.

CATO researchers have advocated for better data collection practices, noting that “the states and federal government should collect better incarceration, conviction, and arrest data by immigration status so that the public and policymakers can more accurately understand how immigrants affect crime in the United States.”

As immigration policy continues to be a polarizing issue in American politics, the disparate statistical pictures painted by different datasets underscore the importance of context and methodology when evaluating claims about immigrant criminality. The gap between localized arrest data highlighted in government press releases and broader incarceration trends revealed in demographic studies suggests that the relationship between immigration status and criminal behavior is far more nuanced than often portrayed in political discourse.