What did Texas data show about homicide conviction rates for undocumented immigrants relative to native‑born residents?

1. What the Texas numbers say, plainly

A decade‑spanning analysis published by the Cato Institute reports that, across 2013–2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas averaged 2.2 per 100,000 among people classified as illegal immigrants compared with 3.0 per 100,000 for native‑born Americans and 1.2 per 100,000 for legal immigrants, leading Cato to conclude illegal immigrants were about 26% less likely than native‑born Americans to be convicted of homicide and legal immigrants about 61% less likely ^{[1] [3]}.

2. Independent academic and government‑funded work echoes the direction of the effect

A peer‑reviewed study published in PNAS and an NIJ‑funded analysis using Texas Department of Public Safety records both found that undocumented individuals had substantially lower rates of serious violent crime and homicide arrests than U.S.‑born residents; the NIJ summary reports a homicide arrest rate of 1.9 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants versus 4.8 per 100,000 for U.S.‑born citizens for 2012–2018, and the PNAS study says undocumented immigrants were roughly half as likely to be arrested for homicide as native‑born citizens ^{[2] [4] [5]}.

3. How researchers measure different things — arrests vs. convictions — and why that matters

The studies do not all measure identical outcomes: some analyze arrests as proxies for offending (the NIJ‑funded work and PNAS study did this), while the Cato analysis focuses on convictions recorded in Texas data, and arrest rates and conviction rates can diverge for many procedural reasons; these definitional differences mean comparisons should be read with caution even as they point in the same direction that undocumented individuals in Texas are not overrepresented among homicide perpetrators by per‑capita measures ^{[2] [1] [4]}.

4. Critiques, data caveats and competing agendas

Critics including the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) argue that Texas’s identification of immigration status is imperfect and that initial undercounting of undocumented people in the “unknown/other” category can bias rate calculations upward or downward as cases are reclassified over time; CIS contends that delayed identification can change the apparent rates and cautions against overconfidence in single‑state estimates ^[6]. The Cato study is from a libertarian think tank led by an author who has publicly argued immigrants commit fewer crimes, which readers should weigh when assessing interpretation and emphasis ^[1]. Media fact‑checks such as Reuters cite the same Texas figures while noting variation in years and measures across studies and rejecting inflated claims like “4,000 killings by undocumented immigrants” that are unsupported by the data ^[7].

5. What the Texas evidence can and cannot resolve

Texas is uniquely valuable because it records immigration status with its arrests and convictions, making it a rare laboratory for this question, and multiple analyses of those records converge on lower homicide arrest and conviction rates for undocumented immigrants compared with native‑born Americans ^{[2] [4] [1]}. Nevertheless, single‑state results do not automatically generalize to all states; methodological choices (arrest vs conviction; population denominators for undocumented counts) and evolving identification practices mean the findings are strong evidence of lower per‑capita homicide involvement by undocumented people in Texas but not the final word on all contexts or time periods ^{[5] [6]}.