What government datasets exist with crime statistics by nativity or immigration status?
Executive summary
Federal and state governments publish several datasets that intersect crime and immigration, but the universe of datasets that directly report criminality by nativity or immigration status is narrow: Texas’s criminal records linked to immigration status are uniquely comprehensive at the state level, while federal enforcement agencies (DHS, ICE, CBP) publish arrest/removal statistics broken out by citizenship or criminal-history categories and the Census Bureau/ACS can be used to study birthplace and incarceration — each source carries key limitations that shape what questions it can reliably answer [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Texas’s Department of Public Safety: the rare state-level dataset that records immigration status
Texas requires recording of immigration status in standard criminal justice records and researchers have used the Texas DPS criminal history (CCH) linked to DHS data to classify arrestees as native-born, lawfully present, or undocumented — a unique dataset enabling direct comparisons of arrest rates by immigration status across all jailable arrests for 2012–2018 [1] [6]. The PNAS study and summaries hosted by the Office of Justice Programs and NIJ note Texas is essentially singular among states in routinely documenting immigration status in arrest records, which is why the Texas dataset is considered ideal and unusually detailed for this question [1] [7] [6].
2. DHS, ICE, and CBP enforcement statistics: citizenship and criminal-history categories, not comprehensive crime rates by nativity
DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics publishes monthly tables on encounters, detentions, removals and other enforcement metrics and provides state-level immigration dashboards, but these are focused on immigration enforcement actions rather than general crime prevalence by nativity [2]. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations statistics break out arrests by country of citizenship and categories of criminal history (convictions, pending charges, or no known convictions) and publish detention/removal time series, useful for enforcement-focused analyses but not equivalent to community crime-rate datasets [4]. CBP similarly publishes “criminal alien” statistics derived from records checks that summarize convictions found in law‑enforcement databases after apprehension; these are enforcement-derived counts rather than population-based crime rates [3].
3. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting and DOJ sources: birthplace and prosecutorial data require linkage and inference
The FBI’s UCR and the National Incident-Based Reporting System do not systematically record immigration status; researchers and advocacy groups often combine UCR crime counts with Census population or ACS birthplace variables to examine correlations between immigrant shares and crime rates — a method that yields ecological insights but cannot assign individual arrests to immigration-status categories without additional record linkage [8]. DOJ publications such as the Prosecuting Immigration Crimes Report and federal analyses may provide case-level or prosecutorial statistics relevant to immigration-related offenses, yet they generally do not provide nationwide arrest rates disaggregated by nativity without special linkage [9].
4. Census Bureau and incarceration data: birthplace available, long-term incarceration measures
Researchers have reconstructed long-run incarceration comparisons using U.S. Census decennial data and American Community Survey information on place of birth for people in correctional facilities, creating nationally representative measures of incarceration by nativity across decades — these are powerful for incarceration studies but measure imprisonment (convictions leading to incarceration) rather than arrest incidence and still require careful definition when interpreted as “crime rates” [5] [10].
5. Limitations, caveats, and measurement debates to keep in mind
Most government sources that touch immigration and criminality are enforcement-oriented (DHS/ICE/CBP) or lack individual immigration-status fields (FBI, most state criminal systems), so the Texas data remain exceptional in providing direct comparisons by immigration status; scholars warn about underreporting, differences between arrests and convictions, and the conflation of immigration law violations with criminal offenses — all of which complicate inferences about underlying criminal behavior versus enforcement patterns [1] [11]. Multiple syntheses and studies (Migration Policy Institute, NIJ, academic reviews) converge on the empirical finding that immigrants often show equal or lower rates of serious offending than the U.S.-born when comparable measures are available, but that conclusion depends on the data source and analytic choices [12] [7] [6] [13].