“Criminal Aliens” Commit Mostly Victimless Crimes, Few Violent Crimes

During his campaign, President Trumppromised to target the “bad hombres” in the United States illegally. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)statistics indicate that his administration has cast a much wider net. More than one in four immigrants that ICE arrested last year had no criminal convictions at all, and of the rest, their convictions were mostly victimless crimes —largely traffic infractions, immigration offenses, and drug offenses. Almost 90 percent were for nonviolent crimes. ICE cannot justify its broad crackdown based on these figures.Figure 1 shows immigrants arrested by ICE by whether they had a criminal conviction (top left) and the distribution of the convictions by type of conviction (bottom right). ICE statistics only provide a list of all convictions that the entire population of criminal aliens committed, meaning that they only show the distribution ofconvictions, not the distribution ofimmigrants based on their most serious offense. That said, a majority of all convictions were for crimes with no private victims (i.e. not the government or “society”). Just 11 percent were violent crimes (just one percent were homicide and sexual assault).Figure 1: Immigrants Arrested by ICE by Criminal Conviction and Distribution of Criminal ConvictionsImmigrants and Type of ConvictionsSource:Immigration and Customs EnforcementFigure 2 shows the distribution within each broad category of convictions. Most violent crimes were assaults, which include simp...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs