What datasets exist that record perpetrator immigration status at the state level, and which states collect them?
Executive summary
Texas is the single clear exception among U.S. states: it requires the collection and retention of immigration status in its criminal booking and publishes related datasets, which researchers and policymakers have used to compare arrest rates by immigration status [1] [2] [3]. At the federal level, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) publish statistics that break out citizenship and criminal-history categories for persons apprehended by the agency, but major national crime data systems (FBI UCR/NIBRS, NCVS, BJS) generally do not provide reliable, standardized perpetrator immigration-status fields at the state level [4] [5] [6] [7].
1. Texas: the documented state-level dataset that records immigration status
Texas’ criminal records practice is unique in that the booking process mandates inquiries on place of birth and citizenship, fingerprints are routed to DHS/IDENT and DHS returns immigration-status determinations to Texas law enforcement, and the state’s Department of Public Safety publishes “Texas Criminal Illegal Noncitizen Data” derived from that process; academics have used this dataset for state-level comparisons of undocumented, documented, and native-born arrest rates [1] [2] [3].
2. Federal immigration enforcement data that include citizenship or criminal-history categories
ICE’s ERO publishes national enforcement statistics that tabulate arrests by country of citizenship and by categories of criminal history (for example, convicted of U.S. crimes, pending U.S. charges, or immigration violations), so researchers can track federal administrative arrests and convictions by nationality and broad criminal-history groupings, but those data reflect ICE’s enforcement universe, not a comprehensive cross-section of state-level criminal suspects or perpetrators [4].
3. Major criminal justice datasets that lack standardized immigration-status fields
Widely used national crime data infrastructures — the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR) and its Crime Data Explorer/NIBRS, the Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys and tools, and the National Crime Victimization Survey archived in NACJD — are designed around offense types, victims, and offender demographics but do not supply a standardized, statewide field for immigration status comparable to Texas’ practice; guides and archives note the breadth of available variables but do not list immigration status as a routine, comparable state-level variable [5] [8] [6] [7].
4. Research evidence and gaps: what scholars have done with state-level status data
Because Texas retains immigration-status returns from DHS for arrested persons, NIJ-funded and peer-reviewed studies have used Texas arrest records to estimate offending rates for undocumented immigrants versus U.S.-born citizens — findings that other scholars and advocates have used to argue both that immigrants are less likely to offend and that Texas’ dataset is uniquely valuable for such comparisons [9] [1] [3]. Those studies themselves acknowledge the limitation that replication in other states is constrained by the absence of comparable state-level immigration-status fields [9].
5. Where ambiguity, local variation, and political incentives matter
Some jurisdictions submit fingerprints to DHS and receive back immigration-related responses for operational purposes, but most do not retain or publish a status field in statewide criminal data; open-data catalogs and state portals host many local crime feeds, yet the presence of immigration-status tagging is inconsistent and ad hoc, creating both methodological gaps and the risk that politically motivated summaries (from either side) will over-interpret incomplete data [10] [5]. Sources such as the American Immigration Council and Migration Policy Center analyze crime and immigrant-share relationships using UCR plus census population denominators, but those approaches infer immigrant involvement indirectly rather than rely on state-maintained perpetrator-status variables [11] [12].
6. Bottom line and limits of reporting
Based on the available reporting, Texas is the only state identified as systematically documenting and publishing immigration status in routine criminal records (and thus supporting state-level perpetrator-status datasets), federal ICE/ERO statistics provide citizenship- and criminal-history breakdowns for federal apprehensions, and national criminal data systems do not offer comparable, standardized state-level perpetrator immigration-status fields; this assessment reflects the sources provided and cannot claim an exhaustive inventory of every local or state experiment not described in those sources [1] [2] [4] [5] [6].