Immigration offenses account for half of all federal arrests, according to Justice Department statistics released Thursday, which focus heavily on the role immigration plays in the federal justice system.
The analysis of federal justice statistics from 2013-14 highlights how much of federal law enforcement is dedicated to immigration-related offenses, continuing the Trump administration’s efforts to place an emphasis on the criminal side of illegal immigration.
“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,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
President Donald Trump has made strict enforcement of immigration laws a key focus of his presidency, and has also ordered several new reports designed to highlight crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, unrelated to Thursday’s DOJ release.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, half of all federal arrests in 2014 were immigration-related, a total of nearly 82,000.
Sixty-one percent of all federal arrests were in the five districts along the US-Mexico border, along with 55% of suspects investigated and 39% of offenders who were given a federal prison sentence.
Other highlighted statistics included that 32% of defendants facing charges in district courts were from Mexico, along with 5% from Central America, and 42% of defendants were non-US citizens. Non-citizens were also one-quarter of federally sentenced prisoners in 2014.
The report also noted that 17% of immigration offenders who were released in 2012 ended up back in federal prison within three years.
But the numbers also illustrate how aggressive immigration enforcement was under former President Barack Obama, whom Trump has repeatedly attacked for being lax on illegal immigration and crime.
The substantial amount of immigration enforcement in 2013 and 2014 were consistent with trends that go back to the Clinton administration. The report notes that immigration arrests doubled from 1994 to 1998, again the next eight years, and then again from 2006 to 2013.
Part of the increases came because the Bush and Obama administrations made an effort to prosecute first-time immigration offenders to deter illegal immigration and also increase potential punishment for illegal re-entry after being prosecuted and deported previously, according to the report and Leon Fresco, a former Obama administration Justice Department official.
While Thursday’s report highlighted a few more immigration-related statistics than the previous report, the 2011-12 report released under the Obama administration also tracked many of the same trends, including half of all federal arrests being related to immigration. That corresponded to DHS law enforcement accounting for half of federal arrests. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arrests increased by an annual average of more than 22% in that report, far outpacing all other federal agencies.
Fresco said 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.”
The statistics also cover a turning point in the Obama administration. Late in 2014, after the collapse of efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, Obama instituted deferred action executive orders and called for far more prosecutorial discretion toward undocumented immigrants, which Fresco suspects will be reflected in the next edition of the report.
“We tried in good faith to show that we would enforce the immigration laws for the first six years of the Obama administration,” Fresco said.
Studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. One study from the American Immigration Council analyzed available data to find immigrants were less likely than native-born Americans to engage in criminal behavior, and a recent analysis by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress argues sanctuary cities enjoy lower crime and better economies than their non-sanctuary counterparts. Both organizations support pro-immigration policies.