How does DHS define “convicted criminal” when reporting immigrant crime statistics in local operations?
Executive summary
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports "criminal aliens" as individuals who have been convicted of one or more crimes, whether those convictions occurred in the United States or abroad, and records those convictions in its enforcement databases [1]. That formal definition, however, sits atop a set of counting choices and legal categories—immigration offenses, traffic crimes, and broadly grouped criminal labels—that make headline “convicted criminal” figures far broader than many readers assume [2] [3].
1. What DHS officially means by “convicted criminal” in its enforcement tallies
DHS and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) state plainly that the term “criminal aliens” refers to individuals with one or more criminal convictions, including convictions obtained abroad, recorded in DHS databases following an interdiction or arrest [1]. The agency’s public materials emphasize a binary DHS database result—convicted or not, legal or illegal—that feeds nationwide summary tables used in public reporting [1] [4].
2. Why the label can be much broader than the public assumes
In practice DHS’s criminal-alien counts include convictions for a wide range of conduct: federal and state crimes, immigration offenses (like illegal entry and reentry), traffic-related convictions (including driving without a license), and categories that bundle serious and minor offenses together, such as “drug-related” or “burglary,” which can span from possession to large-scale trafficking or from shoplifting to major break-ins [2] [3]. Advocacy and research groups have repeatedly pointed out that because ICE and DHS categorize offenses broadly, minor convictions can inflate the appearance of serious criminality in the aggregate numbers [2] [5].
3. How DHS compiles these numbers and the data limits to keep in mind
DHS derives statistics from record checks of law enforcement databases after apprehension; those checks produce conviction histories that are entered into DHS tables [1]. Studies using Texas records illustrate another limitation: local criminal systems and state reporting procedures (for example, Texas sending fingerprints to DHS) shape who appears as a “convicted alien” in federal queries, and DHS’s status flagging is a key part of those linkages [4] [6]. Reporting also depends on which convictions are captured and classified—so totals can reflect prosecutorial priorities (such as increased criminal prosecution of unlawful entry) and state reporting practices, not only underlying violent-crime rates [3] [6].
4. The legal and policy context that shapes who is labeled deportable or “criminal”
Immigration law separately defines removability and bars to relief based on certain conviction categories—aggravated felonies, crimes involving moral turpitude, and other statutorily listed offenses—which can render noncitizens deportable even for offenses that are not “serious” in a policing sense [7]. Policy shifts—like expanded priorities for immigration prosecution and programs such as Operation Streamline—have raised the share of removals and prosecutions tied to immigration offenses themselves, directly altering the composition of DHS “criminal” statistics [3] [5].
5. Competing interpretations and what the numbers do and do not show
Advocacy organizations and researchers caution that DHS’s headline criminal-alien tallies can be misleading when used to imply elevated immigrant violent crime rates, because the counts include many nonviolent and immigration-specific convictions and because some studies find immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants, have lower offending rates than native-born populations [2] [8] [4]. Conversely, DOJ and DHS reports on incarceration and local booking data emphasize large raw counts of convicted noncitizens in jails and prisons to argue for stricter enforcement—numbers that are accurate as counts but require nuance to interpret causation and risk [6].
6. Bottom line: literal definition versus policy-driven meaning
DHS’s technical definition of “convicted criminal” is straightforward—one or more convictions, domestic or foreign, recorded in DHS systems—but the policy and counting choices that feed public statistics make that label functionally broad, often encompassing immigration and minor traffic offenses alongside violent felonies; readers and policymakers must therefore parse categories, prosecutorial trends, and data-source limits rather than treating headline counts as a direct measure of serious criminality [1] [2] [3].