What percentage of US prisoners are legal immigrants versus US-born citizens in 2024?

1. What the question really asks and what the sources can — and cannot — say

The user asks for a percentage split in 2024 between "legal immigrants" and "U.S.-born citizens" among U.S. prisoners, which requires nationality/immigration-status data for the full custodial population across federal and state facilities; the public reporting supplied includes authoritative slices — such as Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Sentencing Commission figures — but not a single, up-to-date national table in the provided documents that gives a 2024 cross‑sectional breakdown of legal immigrants versus U.S.-born in the total incarcerated population, and GAO reporting underscores that some datasets (BOP, ICE, BJS) have classification or timeliness limits that complicate a clean national 2024 percentage ^[8].

2. The clearest hard figure available: federal sentencing in 2024

The United States Sentencing Commission reported that non‑U.S. citizens accounted for 34.7% of all individuals sentenced in fiscal year 2024 — a concrete, recent federal‑court statistic that directly speaks to the composition of those sentenced under federal law in that year, but not to the combined state and local prison population or the legal‑status breakdown (legal vs. unauthorized) within that non‑citizen category ^[1].

3. National and historical context: immigrants are generally a minority among prisoners and have lower incarceration rates

Multiple recent academic studies and syntheses find immigrants are significantly less likely than comparable U.S.-born populations to be incarcerated — for example, long‑run research shows immigrants are now roughly 60% less likely to be incarcerated than the U.S.-born on recent measures, and other reports stress immigrants (documented and undocumented) do not drive higher crime or incarceration rates overall ^{[3] [4] [5] [7] [6]}.

4. Older snapshots and the difficulty of slicing "legal immigrant" versus "U.S.-born"

A detailed 2016 analysis found about 91.69% of prisoners were born in the United States, leaving a minority foreign‑born slice in that snapshot, but that study is dated and combines legal and unauthorized immigrants into broader categories; the provided reporting contains no comprehensive, nationwide 2024 table that separates legal immigrants from unauthorized immigrants and U.S.-born citizens across federal, state, and local custody in a single, comparable statistic ^[2].

5. Why precise 2024 nationwide percentages are elusive and where the data gaps lie

Federal datasets (USSC, BOP) and state reporting differ in scope and timeliness, ICE and BOP exchange rosters and classify foreign‑born inmates, and GAO notes limitations in publicly available citizenship data through 2022—all of which mean that while robust slices exist (e.g., federally sentenced noncitizens = 34.7% in FY2024), the supplied sources do not collectively produce a single authoritative 2024 percentage split between legal immigrants and U.S.-born citizens for the entire U.S. prison population ^{[8] [1]}.

6. How to interpret the best available numbers and competing narratives

The best defensible interpretation from the provided reporting is: immigrants as a whole are a minority of prisoners and are incarcerated at lower rates than the U.S.-born ^{[3] [6]}; for federal sentencing specifically, non‑citizens were about one‑third of those sentenced in FY2024 ^[1]; assertions that immigrants dominate the prison population are contradicted by the studies and government snapshots cited here ^{[3] [2] [1]}, but a precise 2024 nationwide legal‑immigrant vs. U.S.-born percent split cannot be produced from the documents provided because the consolidated national breakdown for that year and those exact categories is not present in these sources ^{[8] [2]}.