Recently, I examined a series of (predictably recurring but erroneous nonetheless) claims that ICE is somehow failing in its mission by expanding arrests and deportation of aliens without “criminal” histories”. The deeper problem is that a series of oxymoronic arguments about alien criminality now define the immigration debate — endangering Americans, both U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants. Once you put the pieces together, you realize how recklessly nuts the whole thing is.
The Criminal Grounds of Inadmissibility and Deportability
Let’s start with the fact that many people (including the Chief Justice and Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) use a term, “illegal alien”, as if it is somehow defined in law.
It’s not, and you can scan the roughly half-million words in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and the approximately half-million others in its implementing regulations and you won’t find those two used in sequence anywhere.
“Illegal alien” is shorthand for any alien at the border or ports or in the interior of the United States who is removable under the grounds of inadmissibility in section 212(a) of the INA or the grounds of deportability in section 237(a) of the INA.
The most common ground of inadmissibility is section 212(a)(6)(A), the one that renders any alien who entered illegally removable, and the most common deportation grounds are section 237(a)(1)(B) and (C), which render nonimmigrant aliens who entered legally but overstayed their admissions or violated the terms of their admissions removable.
But if you read most immigration-related articles, only two removability provisions actually matter: section 212(a)(2) of the INA, which renders criminal aliens who haven’t been admitted removable; and its twin, section 237(a)(2), the ground of deportability for “lawfully admitted” aliens.
That’s nonsense, for no better reasons than not removing aliens who entered illegally makes border security impossible and not deporting aliens who overstayed or violated the terms of their nonimmigrant visas undermines the whole point of having a legal immigration system.
Simply put, without enforcement, there are no laws, regardless of what those laws regulate.
“Most Aliens Aren’t Criminals”
Which brings me to a common claim roughly summarized as “most aliens aren’t criminals”.
Consider, for example, a 2015 report from the American Immigration Council, “The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States”. It begins:
For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education.
One must admire the manner in which AIC makes its points, promoting their reliability (“for more than a century”), consistency (“innumerable studies”), and incontrovertibility (“two simple yet powerful truths”).
And while certain of those points are debatable, given that entering the country illegally and eluding immigration officers is an ongoing crime under section 275(a)(2) of the INA and that aliens without status must necessarily commit serial offenses to replicate their existences here, most others are likely undeniably true.
To enter the United States lawfully, a foreign national must first prove that he does not have a criminal record — that is, he’s not inadmissible under section 212(a)(2) of the INA — and therefore the INA selectively prescreens lawful entrants for criminality in a way the Constitution would not permit in the case of the native-born.
Putting aside Mark Twain’s observation that “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress”, the fact that lawful immigrants are less likely to commit criminal acts than the native-born supports the screening and vetting requirements in the INA, and enforcement of the law itself.
The track record of “the unauthorized” is a bit less clear, as my colleague Steven Camarota has repeatedly explained, because “most jurisdictions don’t carefully track the immigration status of those convicted or incarcerated”, and (given that most crimes are prosecuted at the state and local level) we therefore have little idea how many aliens are criminals, or criminals aliens.
The Dangerous Non-Sequitur
But for sake of argument, let’s assume everything in that AIC excerpt is correct. It still doesn’t explain why the purported fact that “the unauthorized” commit fewer crimes than the native-born justifies so-called “sanctuary” policies.
The Center defines “sanctuary jurisdictions” as:
cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.
With that in mind, consider the following from the March 2025 testimony of an associate professor of political science and public policy at Trinity College, which was offered in support of Connecticut state bill H.B. 7212, an (ultimately unsuccessful) expansion of that state’s sanctuary “TRUST Act”:
Some argue preventing state and local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement increases crime or generates a fiscal burden. Here the research is unequivocal: 1. Immigrants of any status are less likely to commit crimes than native-born residents ... and increases in immigration are not associated with increases in crime.
Or this, from a 2017 National Immigrant Justice Center (NAIJ) article, “The Real-Life Consequences of the President’s Interior Immigration Enforcement Policies”, which argued that :
Immigration to the United States is not a public safety issue. It is certainly true that there have been tragic crimes committed by non-citizens in the United States. It is a sad truth that people of all races, nationalities and creeds commit crime. But it is also the reality that immigration makes us safer. Studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants commit less crime than native born Americans. And while the President [Trump] is threatening to deprive sanctuary jurisdictions of vital federal funds, a study released just last month found that sanctuary jurisdictions in fact have lower crime rates and stronger economies than similar jurisdictions without sanctuary policies. [First emphasis in original, second added.]
Or this, from a June 2017 opinion piece, “Stand up to ICE and stand for California values”, in the San Jose Mercury News, which was published in support of California’s (then-pending and subsequently passed) procrustean sanctuary bill, SB 54:
Federal immigration policies and enforcement have taken an aggressive shift in recent months, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents making arrests at public facilities such as schools and courthouses.
...
The justification given for these aggressive policies is based on the false perception that illegal immigrants are more dangerous and commit more crimes than residents. Several studies conclude the exact opposite: Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. [Emphasis added.]
“I Caution Against Conflating Immigration and Crime”
The poster boy for such claims, however, is likely Kelly Girtz, mayor of Athens, Ga.
During a February 2024 press conference on the murder of nursing student Laken Riley by Jose Ibarra, an illegal migrant from Venezuela who was apprehended at the border and released under the Biden administration in his city, a protestor shouted out: “The blood is on your hands.”
That prompted Girtz to (1) deny his city is a sanctuary, and (2) blurt out the following claim: “I caution against conflating immigration and crime. The data demonstrates that the two are not connected.”
Except, of course, when an illegal immigrant commits a heinous crime, as was true in the case of Ibarra’s slaying of Riley, when the two are directly “connected”.
Even though immigrant criminality is allegedly so rare, sanctuaries still refuse ICE officers access to their jails, prisons, and detention facilities, and won’t honor their detainers, even for the most dangerous and depraved alien criminals.
And it’s only when there is such a “direct connection” between “immigration and crime” — that is when an alien is arrested by a state or locality for violating a criminal statute — that ICE requests access to the jurisdiction’s jails, prisons, or detention facilities to interview the alien, and that it issues detainers to states or localities to hold “criminal” aliens so immigration officers can take them into custody.
But even though immigrant criminality is allegedly so rare, sanctuaries still refuse ICE officers access to their jails, prisons, and detention facilities, and won’t honor their detainers, even for the most dangerous and depraved alien criminals.
Respectfully, you don’t need “more than a century of innumerable studies” to confirm the “simple yet powerful truth” that releasing illegal aliens who’ve been arrested on “felony charges of rape of a child less than 13 years of age, aggravated sexual battery of a victim under 13 years of age, use of a computer to commit sex offense with a minor, and distributing drugs to a minor” instead of handing them over to ICE endangers everyone in communities like Fairfax County, Va.
But fortunately, we do have a landmark 2018 study from DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which tracked the rates of rearrest of nearly 68,000 prisoners (citizens and aliens) released in 2005 over the subsequent 10-year period.
It revealed that 44 percent of released prisoners were arrested again within one year of release; an estimated 68 percent were rearrested within three years; 79 percent within six years; and 89 percent by year nine.
Again, even assuming that AIC is absolutely correct in stating that “immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born”, criminals — regardless of their immigration status — are more likely to serially reoffend and thus endanger their communities more than anybody else.
Irritation Becomes Exasperation
As irritating as it may be that sanctuary jurisdictions endanger their own citizens by ignoring empirical recidivism studies and simple common sense based in part on the non-sequitur that “most immigrants aren’t criminals”, their refusals to assist ICE become exasperating when they show up in immigration arrest statistics and then are spun to support tendentious media claims the agency isn’t targeting “the worst of the worst”.
In a September 2024 report, my colleague Jason Richwine explained that more than half of all illegal aliens live in sanctuaries.
Note that he didn’t, or more precisely couldn’t (for the reasons explained by Camarota), state that more than half of all illegal alien criminals live in those states, but let’s reasonably assume that illegal aliens in sanctuaries New York and California are no more likely to be criminals than in non-sanctuary Florida.
On August 27, CBS News reported that just more than half (800-plus) of ICE’s July average of 1,580 daily arrests involved aliens “without criminal records”. That begs the question of how many more criminal aliens immigration officers could have arrested in July if they just had access to them in the sanctuary jurisdictions where they are being detained (on non-immigration-related charges).
Even if the total number of non-criminal alien arrests had remained constant (which it wouldn’t, as ICE has finite resources and therefore officers arresting criminals wouldn’t be available for non-criminal alien arrests), the total percentage of criminal alien arrests as a proportion of the whole would rise.
It’s oxymoronic to: (1) claim illegal aliens commit fewer crimes; (2) use that claim to justify sanctuary policies that; (3) impede ICE officers’ ability to take the allegedly rare class of alien criminals into custody and then; (4) complain ICE is arresting proportionally more non-criminal aliens than criminal ones.
What’s worse, however — it’s reckless, because this sanctuary mobius loop of sanctimonious inanity puts every innocent person, alien and citizen alike, in danger from the alien criminals sanctuaries are releasing onto their streets instead of handing over to ICE for deportation.