On May 12, my colleague Jason Richwine explained that “sanctuary jurisdictions should take note” of the fact that the aliens they protect when they refuse to honor immigration detainers and block ICE officers from talking to state and local cops have “demonstrated criminal behavior”, and thus should be off the streets and out of the country. I see Richwine’s point and raise him one: Statistics show that when sanctuaries shield convicted criminals from immigration enforcement, they are making it more likely future victims will suffer, because criminals commit crimes, and will almost definitely offend again.
“Update on Prisoner Recidivism”
In May 2018, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) published a “special report”, captioned “2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism: A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014)”.
That report examined “the post-release offending patterns of former prisoners and their involvement in criminal activity both within and outside of the state where they were imprisoned”, and it was compiled via an analysis of “the offending patterns of 67,966 prisoners who were randomly sampled to represent the 401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 in 30 states”.
That analysis 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.
All told, BJS determined, the 400,000-plus prisoners released from state custody in those 30 states in 2005 racked up nearly two million new arrests thereafter, “an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner”.
The best way to summarize that report is as follows: “News Flash! Criminals Commit Crimes”.
To be clear, that report did not focus on alien criminals, U.S. citizen criminals, or even native-born criminals. As Richwine explained, it is difficult in most instances to identify the alienage status of criminals except in a handful of states that try to track such things, and even then, the results are imperfect.
Until someone establishes that alien criminals reoffend at lower levels than our homegrown variety of crooks, however, the BJS report is the best view that we have into criminal recidivism generally and alien criminal recidivism in particular.
“Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes”
Sanctuary jurisdictions are often quick to defend their alien-criminal-shielding policies, ordinances, laws, and statutes by asserting something along the lines of “immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than Americans”.
Likely the best example of this canard was offered by 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.
A protestor at the presser shouted, “The blood is on your hands,” which 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.”
Thank God for “the data” (which Girtz neither presented, detailed, nor described), as I am sure it offered great comfort to the Athens community.
The Protections Built into the INA
In truth, however, U.S. immigration laws are written in such a way as to confirm Mayor Girtz’s assertions — kind of.
When an alien comes to the United States legally as an immigrant (with a green card or the expectation of receiving one) or a nonimmigrant (for a limited period as a tourist or student, or for business purposes, etc.), the State Department and the U.S. government pre-screens that alien for criminality.
Aliens who’ve committed or been convicted of certain crimes under section 212(a)(2) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) are “ineligible to receive visas”, meaning State Department consular officers must deny their applications for the documents they need to come here legally.
They’re also “ineligible to be admitted to the United States”, which is why CBP officers from the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) rescreen those immigrants and nonimmigrants when they arrive at U.S. ports of entry, to ensure that there’s no evidence of criminality the consular officer abroad may have missed.
Only after they have passed both of those screenings are aliens admitted to the United States, so when the system works as supposed to, there should be no connection between “immigration” and “crime” — lawfully admitted aliens should have a lower propensity to commit crimes than Americans, or most other control groups.
That said, some lawfully admitted immigrants and nonimmigrants stray from the straight and narrow after they’re admitted, which is why Congress in section 237(a)(2) of the INA provided a separate list of crimes that render those aliens legally here deportable, and subject to removal.
You see, in 1952, decades before BJS quantified its assumptions, Congress in the INA (and before) used past criminality as a heuristic to assess the likelihood of an alien’s future criminality and so mandated the removal of criminals to protect otherwise law-abiding legal aliens and U.S. citizens.
That’s where Mayor Girtz was correct — to the degree he was.
Where his honor skipped a stitch, however, is cases involving aliens like Ibarra who skipped all that INA-mandated pre-screening and port rescreening and entered illegally.
CBP under Biden likely did the best it could under the constraints the White House placed on it to assess whether aliens of that ilk had committed crimes before arriving here, but the information available to the agency at the border and ports was limited to what was in U.S. databases, and any facts the aliens’ home governments were willing to share.
Ibarra, however, and hundreds of thousands of others like him came from countries that either have poor relations with or are openly hostile to the United States, and they were clearly disinclined to share any derogatory information on their nationals who had flung themselves across the border and into the Biden administration’s warm embrace.
And again, as Richwine explained, there is little to no “data” on crimes that those illegal migrants have committed in this country because few states or localities collect the alienage status of the criminals they have arrested, and what information they do collect is spotty, at best.
Consequently, public information available about the criminality of Biden-released migrants comes from either local reporting or national reporting on high-profile cases such as the shocking murders of Riley, Houston pre-teen Jocelyn Nungaray, and Maryland mother of five Rachel Morin.
The Critical — and Harmful — Non Sequitur
Such individual migrant crimes are usually dismissed as one-off anecdotes, however.
Regardless, when sanctuaries (and their politicos, like Girtz) defend their policies and counter concerns about illegal alien criminals with pablum like “immigration and criminality are not connected”, it’s a non sequitur, because immigration and criminality are connected when the criminal in question is an alien, let alone one here illegally.
It would be like my wife (who frets about my well-being) telling me to put on a raincoat before I advance into a deluge and me responding, “Don’t worry — we live in a semiarid climate where it rarely rains”.
Semi-arid except, of course, when it is raining. The same is true when sanctuary honchos spout their “most aliens aren’t criminals” nonsense as they are shuttling the alien criminals ICE is searching for out the side door of the prison.
Unlike smug but underinformed sanctuary officials, I do have the “data”, thanks to the Bureau of Justice Statistics — and it tells me the odds are that the criminal aliens they release today will be rearrested on average five more times within a decade. Even if it was true that “most illegal aliens aren’t criminals”, the criminals among them are, which is why sanctuaries should stop impeding immigration enforcement.