Think Immigration: Why the Crime Narrative Around Immigrants and Enforcement Is False
This blog post is part of a multi-part series from members of the AILA Rule of Law (AROL) Task Force; for more information about AROL look to Chair Jerry Grzeca’s blog post which is a handy guide to its purpose, priorities, and work.
The Trump administration relies heavily on two claims to justify its aggressive immigration enforcement that may play well politically but are not factually accurate -- that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and that ICE primarily targets people who pose a danger to public safety. The data conclusively establishes that both of these claims are false.
Reality: Immigrants Are LESS Likely to Commit Crimes than Native-Born Individuals
Decades of research consistently show that immigrants, particularly recent arrivals, are much less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. First-generation immigrants exhibit lower crime rates across virtually every major category of offense when compared to native-born Americans. For example, a comprehensive analysis of arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety compared undocumented immigrants, lawful immigrants, and U.S.-born citizens between 2012 and 2018. The findings were striking -- undocumented immigrants had substantially lower felony arrest rates than both lawful immigrants and native-born citizens. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens were more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely for drug crimes, and over four times more likely for property crimes.
National-level data reinforce this conclusion. A 2021 Justice Department study showed that, although prosecutions of immigrants increased between 1990 and 2018, nearly 90 percent of those prosecutions were for immigration-related violations, not violent or property crimes. Meanwhile, U.S.-born citizens were ten times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for weapons offenses, five times more likely for violent offenses, and more than twice as likely for property crimes.
Simply put, the evidence clearly shows that immigrants do not drive crime.
Reality: Immigration Enforcement Is Not Targeting “the Worst of the Worst"
Another persistent claim of the Trump administration is that immigration enforcement is focused on noncitizens who have committed serious crimes. However, data collected from DHS by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) tells a different story.
In February 2026, only 2 percent of Notices to Appear (NTAs) filed in immigration court were based on alleged criminal activity—down from 4 percent the year before. Historically, the contrast is even more striking. Twenty-five years ago, NTAs alleging criminal conduct reached as high as 20 percent of all monthly filings. While there have been fluctuations across administrations, the long-term trend shows a decline—not an increase—in removal cases driven by alleged criminal behavior. And among those in immigration detention with criminal convictions, many involved minor offenses, including traffic violations. If enforcement were truly focused on public safety threats, these numbers would look very different.
In order to justify the extreme militarization of immigration enforcement and the use of heavily armed federal officers from multiple agencies, this administration claims to be targeting noncitizens who are public safety threats. However, the overwhelming majority of immigrants who are being arrested are charged with civil immigration violations, not serious crimes. Repeated public statements that those being arrested, detained and deported are the "worst of the worst” is just not borne out by the data.
Why The Real Facts Matter
This data is essential to counter misinformation in the media, in community discussions and in policy and legislative advocacy. The constant barrage of false information connecting immigrants to an increase in crime not only encourages dangerous enforcement tactics, as evidenced most recently and blatantly in Minneapolis, but also fuels stigma and fear toward immigrant communities.
The facts are undeniable: immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens, and current immigration enforcement overwhelmingly targets people with no criminal history. Moreover, these two realities are likely connected, in that there are not enough noncitizens with criminal histories to arrest, detain and place in removal proceedings to justify a fraction of the funding Congress has allocated to ICE and CBP for immigration enforcement. They are thus compelled to target immigrants with no criminal histories in order to account for their unprecedented resources. But any honest conversation about immigration enforcement must be based on the facts, not these pernicious myths regarding immigrants and crime.
