How many illegal immigrants committed felonies
Executive summary
There is no single, authoritative count of “how many illegal immigrants committed felonies” because different agencies measure different populations (apprehensions, detainees, convictions, noncitizen federal sentences) and immigration status is not consistently recorded across criminal justice datasets; available sources point to large but varying totals rather than a single nationwide number [1] [2] [3]. Aggregated figures cited in public debate—such as ICE’s claim of hundreds of thousands of noncitizens with convictions on its non-detained docket—reflect specific agency caseloads, not a comprehensive national tally of felons who entered without authorization [4].
1. Why the simple question has no simple number
A precise national count would require linking immigration status to state and federal criminal conviction records for the entire resident population over time, but U.S. data systems are fragmented: Customs and Border Protection reports convictions discovered after border apprehension for border-patrol encounters, ICE reports counts for its own dockets, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports federally sentenced non-citizens, and many state systems do not systematically capture immigration status, so disparate sources answer different questions and cannot be summed into one definitive “how many” [1] [2] [3].
2. What agency-level snapshots show
Agency snapshots illustrate scale but not scope: ICE officials have reported hundreds of thousands of noncitizens with criminal histories on the agency’s non-detained docket—Lechleitner cited 662,566 noncitizens on the NDD with 435,719 described as “convicted criminals” and 226,847 with pending charges, a figure reflecting ICE caseloads rather than an estimate of all unauthorized immigrants who have ever committed felonies nationwide [4]. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported 21,304 federally sentenced non‑U.S. citizens in FY2024—34.7% of all federal sentences—but most of those noncitizen federal cases are immigration-related or drug trafficking rather than a state felony census of unauthorized entrants [2]. ICE detention snapshots also show most people in custody lack criminal convictions—TRAC reported roughly 73.6% of people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction as of late 2025—highlighting how detention counts and conviction counts diverge [3].
3. What academic and policy research says about rates, not raw counts
Multiple peer‑reviewed and government‑funded studies consistently find undocumented immigrants have lower arrest and conviction rates for violent, property, drug, and other felony categories than U.S.-born residents; NIJ-funded research in Texas found undocumented arrest rates less than half those of native-born residents for violent and drug crimes and roughly a quarter for property crimes, and national reviews reach similar conclusions [5] [6] [7]. Migration Policy and advocacy research caution that increases in immigrant population share have coincided with falling overall crime rates, and that crude counts of noncitizen convictions can be misleading without denominators and context [7] [8].
4. How different definitions and politics shape the numbers
Numbers cited in policy debates often reflect political goals: lawmaker requests and ICE responses emphasize convicted noncitizens on agency dockets to argue for enforcement changes, while researchers emphasize per-capita rates to challenge narratives tying immigration to rising crime; a 2016 Migration Policy analysis modeled scenarios that produced widely different estimates (from hundreds of thousands to 820,000 unauthorized immigrants with convictions depending on assumptions), underscoring how methodology and implicit agendas shape headlines [9] [4].
5. Bottom line—what can be stated with confidence
It is not possible from the provided sources to produce a single, definitive national count of how many illegal (unauthorized) immigrants have committed felonies; available authoritative figures are partial snapshots—federal sentencing counts (21,304 noncitizen federal sentences in FY2024), ICE caseload counts (hundreds of thousands on the non‑detained docket with convictions), and state research showing lower per‑capita offending rates among undocumented populations—which together show significant absolute numbers but also that unauthorized immigrants, as a group, commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born residents in multiple studies [2] [4] [5] [6].