What agency tracks crimes by illegal immigrants
Executive summary
No single, neutral federal agency is charged with producing a comprehensive tally of “crimes by illegal immigrants”; instead, portions of that subject are tracked by immigration enforcement agencies and by independent researchers who stitch together multiple data sources, each with important limits and political uses [1][2][3].
1. Who collects data that gets described as “crimes by illegal immigrants”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), specifically its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Criminal Alien Program, compiles and publishes arrests and removals and breaks those actions into categories by criminal history (convictions, pending charges, or no convictions) and by country of citizenship, and it produces public statistics on those arrests [1][4]. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) likewise publishes Criminal Alien Statistics based on Border Patrol enforcement actions and records checks of law‑enforcement databases following apprehension [2]. Other federal entities (for example, the Department of Homeland Security components and their inspector generals) collect related operational data but do not produce a single nationwide “illegal‑immigrant crime” ledger [5].
2. How those agencies define and compile the data
ICE’s ERO classifies people arrested into categories such as U.S. criminal convictions, pending criminal charges, or those with no convictions but who violated immigration law (including re‑entry after removal), and ERO officers use federal, state and local databases plus court dockets to assemble case packets for enforcement prioritization [1][4]. CBP’s “criminal alien” reports rely on record checks against available law enforcement databases and count people with prior convictions regardless of where convictions occurred [2]. These operational datasets are built from arrest records, immigration‑case files and interagency database queries rather than from a population‑level crime survey [4][1].
3. Key gaps, methodological limits and what that means for interpretation
Neither ICE nor CBP produce unbiased measures of the prevalence of criminal behavior among unauthorized immigrants versus other populations; their data are enforcement outputs rather than population‑based crime statistics and therefore reflect who came into contact with enforcement and investigative priorities [1][4]. National crime statistics compiled by law‑enforcement reporting systems (e.g., FBI Uniform Crime Reporting) do not reliably include immigration status, and only a few jurisdictions—most notably Texas—have produced systematic comparisons of arrests or convictions by immigration status, which independent scholars cite when estimating rates [6][7]. As Migration Policy and policy researchers emphasize, studies drawing different conclusions often rely on different definitions, samples and adjustments, so operational agency counts cannot be read as definitive evidence of overall criminality [6][7].
4. Who analyzes, aggregates and challenges agency numbers
Independent data aggregators and researchers such as TRAC (Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse), think tanks and academic groups compile and analyze court filings and agency releases to provide broader trend pictures and caveats; TRAC offers detailed prosecution and detention dashboards built from public filings and agency data [3][8]. Advocacy and research organizations including Migration Policy Institute and the American Immigration Council synthesize multiple sources and note that immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, often have lower crime rates than U.S.‑born populations—a finding that highlights the difference between enforcement counts and population risk [6][9].
5. Political framing, agendas and the practical takeaway
Agency reports from ICE and CBP serve operational purposes and are also used in political debates about enforcement priorities, which can skew public perception when enforcement tallies are presented as population‑level crime measures; journalists and analysts must therefore pair agency statistics with academic and jurisdictional studies to avoid conflating arrests/detentions with prevalence [10][4]. For anyone seeking a straight answer to “what agency tracks crimes by illegal immigrants”: ICE and CBP are the principal federal collectors of enforcement and “criminal alien” data, while independent research centers like TRAC and policy groups perform aggregation, context and critique—but all of these sources have definitional and sampling limits that shape what the numbers actually mean [1][2][3].