One in five inmates in federal prison are foreign-born, of which 92 percent are unlawfully present in the United States, according to a recently released report.
The report, produced jointly by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, shows that of 58,766 “known or suspected aliens” in custody between the Bureau of Prisons and United States Marshal facilities, 37,557 are confirmed non-citizens. Of that number, 35,334 (a full 94 percent) were illegally present in the United States. It’s worth noting that DHS data returns are incomplete, because state prisons and local jails, where nearly 90 percent of the U.S. incarcerated population is held, do not routinely provide such data to the federal government.
Are those statistics on criminal aliens surprising? Maybe to Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by John Podesta. “The report proves one thing only: The administration will take any opportunity possible to twist facts to demonize immigrants.”
Jawetz further claims that the “vast majority of immigrants in federal prison are there for crimes that only immigrants can be charged with — illegal entry and illegal entry after removal. When you cook the books you shouldn’t pretend to be surprised by the results.”
Scintillating, but misleading, because chalking it up to just illegal entry and re-entry doesn’t provide the proper purview of the issue. Although the DHS report doesn’t specify which crimes non-citizens were convicted of, U.S. Sentencing Commission data does.
Recently featured on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was the latest USSC report, spotlighting 67,742 felony and Class A misdemeanor cases in 2016. Of that number, non-citizens accounted for 41.7 percent of all offenders.
Commission sentencing data revealed non-citizens account for 72 percent of drug possession convictions, 33 percent of money laundering convictions, 29 percent of drug trafficking convictions, 23 percent of murder convictions, and 18 percent of fraud convictions — that’s about 7 percent of the population accounting for one-fifth of all federal murder.
Like the DHS report, USSC reports only show sentencing data of federal offenders, excluding the state and local level, where the majority of sentencing occurs.
To get an idea of what is not typically relayed by state and local authorities, a look at a 2005 Government Accountability Office report is instructive. The report showed that non-citizens (legal and illegal aliens) accounted for 27 percent of federal inmates, a number that has remained consistently around 25 percent since the first GAO report. That slice of the pie would require non-citizens to commit crimes around three times the rate of citizens.
Conceivably, progressives and some moderates may argue that immigrants are still, in general, less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, based on a large body of distorted data promulgated by left-wing mountebanks. For those yet unconvinced of the need for immigration reform, a look at the GAO report from 2011 may provide some sobering perspective.
The updated report furnishes data from 251,000 criminal aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. In total, these criminal aliens were arrested 1.7 million times, for nearly 3 million combined offenses. Further, 50 percent had been arrested at least once for assault, homicide, robbery, a sex offense, or kidnapping — around half had been arrested at least once for a drug violation.
It’s difficult to believe the “sanctuary cities are safe cities” and the every-alien-a-good samaritan narratives are so entrenched, even as 58.5 percent of Hispanics “support Donald Trump’s immigration policies.”
Millions have been needlessly victimized, a high cost for cheap labor, as thousands of criminal aliens have been let free for the progressive political project’s Potemkin village. Indeed, Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., pardoned two criminal aliens just to prevent their deportation next week by immigration authorities.
Trump’s administration is taking the right steps to secure America’s borders, and the reality is, enforcement failures and poor policy have done far more to stigmatize immigrants than anything Trump has said. Had previous administrations not failed to secure our borders, the issue would not exist, and more than half of Hispanic Americans agree that it’s time to act.
Pedro Gonzalez is the site manager of The Millennial Review and assistant editor of Shield Society.
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