Reader TTS

On 22 June 2018, in the middle of a family separation controversy stemming from the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, U.S. President Donald Trump himself recycled a claim that

undocumented immigrants had committed a disproportionately large number of homicides in the United States.

"Sixty-three thousand Americans since 9/11 have been killed by illegal aliens," the president said. "This isn't a problem that's going away, it's getting bigger."

Not only was evidence for that claim lacking, it would require a seemingly superhuman murder spree by the nation's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants to be true.

The president's statement came amidst a cascade of public outcry against internment camps established by the government for undocumented children, which prompted the Trump administration to

quickly change course and order undocumented families to be held together. But while the president accused reporters of failing to cover this alleged rash of homicides, the numbers did not

support this claim.

According to data provided for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 260,743 homicides in the United States took place from 2002 through 2016 (the most recent year available). It

thus seems mathematically impossible that undocumented immigrants, who make up roughly report from the Government Accountability Office, claiming that 25,064 undocumented immigrants had been

arrested for homicides between 2004 and 2008. In fact, the statistic covered the time period between August 1955 and April 2010, a difference of nearly 51 years. The first, misstated

timeframe would work out to about 17 homicide arrests per day; the real timeframe works out to approximately 1.25 arrests of undocumented persons for homicide per day, or 456 arrests per

year.

If we multiply that figure by eighteen just to be generous (11 September 2001 to 22 June 2018), we get a final figure of about 8,218 arrests, as opposed to the faulty metric yielding a total

of around 112,790 homicide arrests in the same timeframe. (We will, for now, ignore the fact that arrests are not the same as convictions, and note that we did not factor in leap days.) So

the numbers in the claim fall flat on both the number of murders committed and the arrests and convictions associated with those murders.

In March 2018 an Arizona woman, Mary Ann Mendoza, reportedly related to the president the claim that "63,000" United States citizens had been killed by undocumented immigrants. Mendoza's son

was killed in 2014 by an undocumented drunk driver.

Although the president has attempted to cast immigrants as criminals since he first announced his candidacy in June 2015, various analyses have already undermined the notion that people in

the United States without documentation were more likely to commit crimes in general than those born in the country. One of those studies, published in February 2018 by the libertarian group

Cato Institute, examined data on criminal convictions in Texas for 2015 and found that:

There were 951 total homicide convictions in Texas in 2015. Of those, native-born Americans were convicted of 885 homicides, illegal immigrants were convicted of 51 homicides, and legal

immigrants were convicted of 15 homicides. The homicide conviction rate for native-born Americans was 3.88 per 100,000, 2.9 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants, and 0.51 per 100,000 for legal

immigrants (Figure 2). In 2015, homicide conviction rates for illegal and legal immigrants were 25 percent and 87 percent below those of natives, respectively.

Illegal immigrants made up about 6.4 percent of the Texas population in 2015 but only accounted for 5.4 percent of all homicide convictions. Legal immigrants made up 10.4 percent of the

Texas population but accounted for only 1.6 percent of homicide convictions. native-born Americans made up 83 percent of the Texas population but accounted for 93 percent of all homicide

convictions.

Although the Trump administration has called immigration at the southern U.S. border a "crisis" that has a deleterious effect on public safety, unauthorized border crossings are currently

the lowest they have been in decades and studies have consistently