Migrant crime grows as campaign issue — but is there an actual spike? – Washington Examiner

Republicans are pointing to a series of high-profile murders to argue that President Joe Biden is overseeing a wave of migrant crime as data on whether there is a true uptick nationally are hard to come by.

Migrant advocates have long noted that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime than U.S. citizens, citing long-standing research on incarceration rates. But the highly covered deaths of several Americans, amplified by Republicans in the run-up to the election, have brought the issue to the forefront of many voters’ minds.

The murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley earlier this year became so politically explosive that Biden mentioned her at his State of the Union, while last week, Oklahoma police arrested a Venezuelan illegal immigrant believed to have brutally killed Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland, last summer.

Other incidents, including attacks on New York police plus sexual assaults and murders against pre-teen girls and single women in Texas and Iowa, have also attracted media coverage this month.

Democrats frame the focus as a matter of scare-mongering. On the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump has claimed that countries are emptying their jail cells and insane asylums as a large influx of migrants entered the United States, while congressional Republicans have introduced a series of bills to address the deaths.

However, right-leaning immigration groups and some in law enforcement insist there is an uptick in crime, even as they acknowledge a lack of statistics to paint a trend.

“Anecdotally, yes, it’s up,” a spokesperson for the National Association of Police Organizations said, declining to comment further in an email on Monday.

Conservatives point to a rise in the number of criminal aliens apprehended at the southern border. As the number of border crossings has risen, reaching a new high in December, so have those with a conviction, either in the U.S. or abroad.

That figure spiked to about 10,800 in fiscal 2021, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and registered at nearly 15,300 in 2023. So far in 2024, the number stands at 13,100.

But there is no way to quantify criminal immigrants who entered the country undetected, while crime data are dependent on cities recording the citizenship status of those in prison and then providing that information to the federal government, which 49 states do not do.

Migrant advocacy groups also note that the crime rate has fallen nationally following a rise during the COVID-19 pandemic despite the high number of border crossings.

Republicans have been quick to point to Biden’s decision to undo multiple Trump-era immigration policies upon assuming office, despite a recent tack to the right on the border, as the cause for the crisis. But they’ve also sought to blame the president directly for instances of crime.

“We are seeing an increasing number of shocking and wanton acts of violence and depravity on a consistent basis. The tragic cases of Americans like Kate Steinle and Molly Tibbetts used to be the exception, but on Biden and Mayorkas’ watch, they’ve become the rule,” Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), the chairman of the House Homeland Security, said in a statement. “This should come as no surprise given the historic number of people allowed into this country, most of whom have not been adequately screened or vetted by DHS law enforcement — and there’s no end in sight.”

A new website that debuted on Monday aims to track migrant crime in real time. IllegalAlienCrimes.com includes a map with state-by-state and county-by-county data on incidents that have occurred nationwide since Biden took office.

The website was funded and created by Restoration of America, a site developed by Army veteran and 2014 Illinois Senate candidate Doug Truax. Senior investigative researcher Vicky Manning said in a call Monday that the site was meant to make it easier for the public to see how migrant crime affected communities nationwide.

However, there is no “national clearinghouse for immigration statistics,” noted Eric Ruark, the research director of conservative nonprofit group NumbersUSA, who maintained that anecdotal evidence supports the idea that migrant crime is on the rise.

Green added that because sanctuary cities, places that will not turn over illegal immigrants in local jails to federal immigration authorities for deportation, do not inquire about immigration status at the time of arrest, it is “impossible to determine the true illegal alien crime rate.”

Several migrant advocacy groups and think tanks have treated the idea that immigrants are fueling a crime wave with a heavy dose of skepticism.

The Immigrant Legal Resource Center in Washington declined to comment on the present situation but pointed to two studies by the Brennan Center for Justice and Stanford University’s Institute of Economic Policy Research.

“The factors that drive crime rates are extraordinarily complex and can rarely be reduced to one cause,” the Brennan Center report stated. “Policymakers should refrain from blaming immigrants as a group for increased crime where data does not substantiate those claims.”

The latter report found immigrants in the U.S. between 1850 and 2020 were less likely to be imprisoned than U.S. citizens.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Washington-based American Immigration Council said anecdotal information on crime was not factual and any increase in news headlines may only be because the media is paying more attention to the issue, not because more migrants are being arrested on criminal charges.

“Given the attention the Trump campaign has been paying to the issue, some incidents which may not have made national media in previous years have been elevated into the national discourse (for example, low-level offenses such as fights or petit larceny),” Reichlin-Melnick, AIC policy director, said. “As a result, it’s hard to say even anecdotally whether these offenses are happening more often, or simply whether the media is paying more attention to it.”

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“What we do know is that the data shows that violent crime is falling in most locations across the country. If migrants were bringing a special level of criminality, then you would expect to see a spike in crime in areas with more migrants. But that is not happening,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “Crime rates have continued to fall even in locations which have received tens of thousands of migrants. For example, New York City’s ‘major crimes’ rate today is lower than it was a year ago.”

The White House declined to comment when asked whether the president’s border policies had affected public safety and pointed the Washington Examiner to the Biden campaign. The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment.