Number of women and children each year that are violently murdered by illegals?
Executive summary
There is no reliable, nationwide count of how many women and children are violently murdered each year specifically by people in the United States without legal status; multiple fact‑checks and research reviews state that U.S. systems do not produce that disaggregated national figure [1]. What the published research does provide is consistent evidence that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—do not commit homicide at higher rates than the U.S.-born and in many studies commit violent crimes at lower rates [2] [3] [4].
1. No authoritative national tally exists, so a single number cannot be produced
Major fact‑checks and reporting are explicit: there is no nationwide dataset that flags homicide victims by the immigration status of the perpetrator, and therefore claims that “X women and Y children are murdered every year by illegals” lack a verifiable empirical basis (Reuters fact‑check) [1]. State or federal law‑enforcement feeds—like CBP’s “criminal alien” tallies—record particular convictions or encounters but do not, in a standard, validated national way, produce an annual demographic breakdown of homicide victims attributable to undocumented perpetrators across the whole country [5].
2. Best available research points away from higher homicide risk among undocumented people
Multiple peer‑reviewed and policy analyses, using arrest and victimization data, find that concentrations of undocumented immigrants are associated with similar or lower rates of violent crime, and that undocumented individuals are often less likely to be arrested for homicide than the U.S.‑born—findings repeated in national reviews and focused studies such as the Texas arrest‑data analysis (PNAS) and multi‑state empirical work (National Institute of Justice summaries; Migration Policy explainer) [3] [6] [7] [4]. These studies do not, however, translate into a national count of women or children killed by undocumented perpetrators in a given year.
3. Studies of foreign‑born homicide victims illuminate patterns but not immigration‑status perpetrators
Analyses using the National Violent Death Reporting System examined foreign‑born homicide victims and found notable differences in circumstances and country‑of‑origin patterns for victims, but those reports generally classify victims’ nativity rather than reliably identifying perpetrators’ immigration status—so they cannot be used to derive annual counts of women and children murdered by undocumented perpetrators nationally [8].
4. State‑level exceptions and imperfect proxies exist, but they are limited
A few jurisdictions keep records that allow more detailed comparisons (for example, Texas arrest records used in the PNAS study), and federal agencies publish “criminal alien” encounter or conviction summaries, but these datasets are not uniform, do not capture all relevant cases, and often conflate past convictions, foreign convictions, or immigration enforcement encounters with contemporaneous culpability for homicides of women or children in the United States—making them unreliable proxies for a clean national tally [3] [5].
5. Why numbers circulate despite data gaps: politics, misinterpretation, and historical scapegoating
Claims that large, round numbers of victims are killed annually by undocumented immigrants persist because of political incentives to link immigration to public‑safety threats and because social media amplifies unverified aggregate figures; researchers and advocacy groups repeatedly caution that such narratives repeat long‑standing scapegoating themes that historical analysis shows are frequently unsupported by data (American Immigration Council; policing‑research briefs) [2] [9].
6. What responsible reporting can and cannot say right now
Responsible empirical conclusions are: (a) it is not possible to provide a verified annual count of women and children murdered specifically by undocumented perpetrators at the national level given current data systems [1]; (b) the body of peer‑reviewed research indicates that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, do not drive higher violent‑crime or homicide rates and in many analyses show lower rates than the U.S.‑born [4] [3] [7]; and (c) for jurisdiction‑specific questions, the only path to a defensible count is local records with transparent methods—while recognizing that even local records often lack standardized immigration‑status coding or may reflect enforcement selection biases [5] [8].