Are Undocumented Immigrants More Likely to Commit Crime Than U.S. Citizens?

In a year when immigration policy has dominated headlines, new data on migrant crime has sparked intense debate among lawmakers and advocacy groups. The conflicting statistics, drawn from different sources and methodologies, paint starkly different pictures of the relationship between immigration status and criminal activity in the United States.

A Department of Homeland Security press release recently ignited controversy when it reported that New York state had released nearly 7,000 individuals with active Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers between January and early December 2023. These individuals, whom federal authorities had specifically requested be held for transfer to federal custody, were instead released by New York officials who declined to honor the detainer requests.

According to DHS figures, these individuals had been charged with or convicted of serious offenses, including 29 homicides, 2,509 assaults, 300 weapons offenses, and 207 sexual predatory offenses. The data, drawn directly from local and state arrest and conviction records, provides a snapshot of cases that intersected with New York’s criminal justice system rather than overall immigrant crime rates.

When examined alongside federal conviction data, however, a different pattern emerges. Federal statistics tracking nationwide noncitizen convictions show that illegal entry and re-entry remain the most common federal convictions for noncitizens, typically totaling 8,000 to 10,000 cases annually. Driving under the influence ranks as the second most common conviction category, while drug and theft convictions number in the hundreds to low thousands each year.

This discrepancy highlights a critical limitation in the data: federal conviction numbers capture only federal offenses, which represent a small subset of total criminal activity. Most crimes are prosecuted at the state and local level, creating significant gaps in the national understanding of immigrant crime patterns.

Research from the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute offers a broader perspective. Analyzing more than a decade of data from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, CATO found that immigrants—both legal and undocumented—consistently show lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans.

Their 2023 findings revealed that native-born Americans had an incarceration rate of 1,221 per 100,000, while undocumented immigrants had a rate of 613 per 100,000—roughly half that of U.S. citizens. Legal immigrants had the lowest incarceration rate at 319 per 100,000. According to CATO, these patterns remained consistent throughout the 2010-2023 study period.

State-level data from Texas and Georgia—the only two states that systematically track immigration status in their criminal justice records—show similar trends. In Texas, undocumented immigrants had lower conviction and arrest rates than native-born residents, even for serious offenses like homicide. Georgia’s data likewise indicated lower incarceration rates for undocumented immigrants compared to U.S.-born residents.

The conflicting narratives emerging from these datasets underscore the challenges of developing evidence-based immigration policy. The DHS press release highlights specific cases where undocumented immigrants committed serious crimes after being released despite ICE detainers—events that raise legitimate public safety concerns. Meanwhile, broader statistical analyses suggest that immigrants as a population commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.

CATO researchers have called for improved data collection at both state and federal levels to provide policymakers and the public with more accurate information about the relationship between immigration status and criminal activity.

“The states and federal government should collect better incarceration, conviction, and arrest data by immigration status,” the institute noted, “so that the public and policymakers can more accurately understand how immigrants affect crime in the United States.”

As the debate over immigration policy continues, the disparate datasets highlight how different statistical approaches can lead to dramatically different conclusions about the same underlying issue—a reminder of the complexity involved in crafting policies that balance security concerns with empirical evidence.