What federal data sources (if any) track crimes by immigration status and how complete are they?
Executive summary
Federal data that explicitly link criminal activity to immigration status exist, but they are fragmented: immigration enforcement agencies (ICE, CBP) and some federal justice bodies (U.S. Sentencing Commission, Bureau of Justice Statistics) collect and publish citizenship or “criminal alien” tallies, while mainstream crime-reporting systems do not record immigration status, leaving no comprehensive national picture [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. The most complete contrasts come from narrow slices — federal prosecutions, immigration enforcement encounters, and the exceptional Texas state dataset — each of which has clear methodological limits that undercut any simple inference about “immigrant crime” nationwide [4] [3] [5] [6].
1. Which federal sources do record immigration or citizenship in crime data — and what they cover
Immigration agencies maintain the most explicit counts: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) separates ERO arrests by categories of criminal history and country of citizenship, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) publishes “criminal alien” tallies derived from post‑apprehension records checks [2] [1]. At the federal justice end, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports demographics of federally sentenced non‑U.S. citizens (including breakdowns by legal status in its summaries) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics produces tables on suspects/prosecutions by citizenship for matters concluded by federal prosecutors [3] [4]. These sources are real, regularly updated, and oriented to enforcement and adjudication contexts [2] [1] [3] [4].
2. Major national crime systems do not record immigration status
The country’s primary crime surveillance systems — the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports/National Incident‑Based Reporting System and the National Crime Victimization Survey — do not collect immigration status on victims, arrestees, or offenders, a gap that scholars repeatedly flag as critical for answering basic questions about immigrants and crime at scale [5] [7]. Academic and public‑interest analyses therefore cannot rely on these nationwide, standardized datasets to separate undocumented, legal immigrant, and native‑born offending rates [5] [7].
3. One instructive outlier: Texas and federally funded research
Texas is the rare state that systematically records immigration status in routine criminal justice records, and researchers used those data to compare undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and U.S. citizens, finding substantially lower arrest rates among undocumented immigrants for many felony categories [5] [8]. The National Institute of Justice and Office of Justice Programs have highlighted this Texas research as uniquely informative because virtually no other jurisdiction collects similarly complete, standardized immigration‑status information at arrest [6] [8].
4. How complete and reliable are the federal data that do exist?
The available federal data are incomplete for national prevalence questions: ICE/CBP counts reflect enforcement priorities and encounters rather than a population‑based criminality rate [2] [1], federal prosecution and sentencing data cover only cases that reach U.S. attorneys or federal courts [4] [3], and state exceptions like Texas remain non‑representative of the country as a whole [5]. Researchers also caution that arrest data are imperfect proxies for offending because they conflate law enforcement activity, prosecutorial discretion, and true offending behavior [6].
5. Alternative findings, limited local programs, and political context
Some analyses drawing on 287(g) and other localized enforcement collaborations have reported higher shares of immigrants among arrests in specific counties, but scholars warn these samples are small, selected, and influenced by programs that screen for immigration status — undermining generalization [9]. Enforcement agencies’ public reporting (CBP/ICE) understandably emphasizes “criminal aliens,” a framing that advances detention and removal priorities and must be read as mission‑driven data communication rather than unbiased population surveillance [1] [2].
6. Bottom line — what the federal picture supports and what it does not
Federal sources that track immigration status exist but are narrow: enforcement databases (ICE, CBP) and federal justice statistics capture citizenship or “criminal alien” counts within their operational scopes, while true nationwide, standardized crime systems do not record immigration status, leaving a persistent evidentiary gap that only isolated state datasets (notably Texas) partially fill [2] [1] [4] [5]. Any claim about immigrant criminality at the national level must therefore acknowledge these data limits, rely on careful interpretation of enforcement and federal prosecution figures, and weigh the unique evidence from Texas against the absence of comparable national measures [5] [6] [8].