61% of federal criminal arrests are of non-citizens

61% of federal criminal arrests are of non-citizens

The liberal Pew Research Center analyzed new data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and found that most of the people arrested and charged with crimes by the federal government are not citizens.

While immigration violations now are half the arrests made by federal agents, non-citizens also made up a disproportionately high percentage of those charged with crimes by the federal government.



Non-citizens (both legal and illegal) make up 7% of the nation's population.

But 22% of the people charged with federal crimes not related to immigration are non-citizens.

From Pew Research:

In 2014, 61% of all federal arrests involved non-U.S. citizens, up from 43% in 2004. U.S. citizens, by contrast, accounted for 39% of all arrests in 2014, down from 57% a decade earlier. (Totals omit cases in which records are missing or unknown.)

The geographic distribution of federal arrests also shows the growing emphasis on immigration offenses. In 2014, 61% of all federal arrests – or more than 100,000 – occurred in just five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2004, those five districts – one each in Arizona, California and New Mexico, plus two in Texas – accounted for 40% of federal arrests.

The annual totals used in this analysis are by federal fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30 of the year cited. The data refer to the number of arrests made by the federal government, not to the number of people arrested, since individuals may be arrested more than once. (About 156,000 people were arrested for federal crimes in fiscal 2014; there were about 165,000 total federal arrests that year.) The data also don’t reflect the number of people who are ultimately prosecuted or convicted, since not all arrests result in prosecution or conviction.

In addition, arrest figures for immigration offenses are not the same as migrant apprehensions or deportations. Apprehensions refer to cases in which foreign nationals are caught in the U.S. without authorization and can include civil as well as criminal violations. Arrests refer to cases in which individuals are booked for criminal violations of federal immigration laws, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The number of apprehensions each year is far higher than the number of federal arrests for immigration offenses.) Deportations, meanwhile, refer to cases in which unauthorized immigrants are removed from the country.

Local and state officials handle 90% of the crime in the United States. As 60% of the illegal alien population now lives in sanctuary cities that deliberately do not track nationality, such statistics on a local or state level are useless.

Which is a shame because if such information were available, it might change opinions on illegal aliens -- and make us safer.