Half of 2014 Federal Arrests Involved Immigration Offense; DOJ Calls for Enforcement
The Department of Justice renewed its call to enforce immigration laws Thursday as newly released data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show half of all federal arrests in 2014 was for an immigration-related offense.
"These statistics make it clear that immigration-related offenses along the United States border with Mexico account for an enormous portion of the federal government's law enforcement resources and that we must enforce our immigration laws in a way that consistently deters future violations," Department of Justice spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement.
The Federal Justice Statistics Program collects, standardizes, and reports on administrative data from the U.S. Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and U.S. Sentencing Commission.
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A summary of the agency's 2013-2014 report released this month said nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of all federal arrests in 2014 were in the five districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. And in half of those arrests, the most serious arrest offense was an immigration offense.
"U.S. attorneys investigated 138,177 matters involving 160,505 suspects in 2014. For two-thirds of suspects in matters referred to U.S. attorneys in 2014, their most serious charge was an immigration or drug offense," the summary said.
The report also revealed that 55 percent of defendants charged in U.S. district court in 2014 were of Hispanic origin and 42 percent of them were not U.S. citizens.
An outspoken critic of U.S. immigration policy during his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Leon Fresco, a former Obama administration Justice Department official, told CNN that while the report may look like evidence that non-citizens and undocumented immigrants are dangerous, it's actually more a reflection that immigration offenses are the easiest federal crime to prosecute.
"If you were to read those cold, you would read those and you would say, 'Oh my God, Latinos and immigrants and Mexicans are so violent and so prone to crime,' and really what the actual way to read that is that in the federal system, it's not like the state system where most crimes are prosecuted," Fresco said. "There has to be an interstate or international nexus to prosecute a federal crime, so in the federal system, the easiest type of federal crime to prove is illegal immigration."
A 2015 report from the American Immigration Council on the criminalization of immigration in the United States also showed that immigrants, legal or undocumented, are less likely than native-born Americans to be involved in serious crime.
"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," the report said.
"This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not 'criminals' by any commonly accepted definition of the term. For this reason, harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence," it said.
