Which states record immigration status in criminal arrest and conviction databases, and how can researchers access those records?
Executive summary
Only a small number of jurisdictions explicitly record immigration status alongside state criminal arrest and conviction records; academic reporting identifies Texas as the only U.S. state that systematically tracks arrests and convictions by immigration status, while most other state criminal databases do not contain a routine "immigration status" field and rely instead on biometric or federal matches [1] [2]. Researchers seeking usable data therefore lean heavily on federal immigration enforcement datasets, specialized clearinghouses, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to reconstruct links between criminal records and immigration encounters [3] [4] [5].
1. What the record systems actually track — state vs. federal separation
State criminal justice systems generally collect fingerprints and criminal history, and those fingerprints are forwarded to the FBI; under programs like Secure Communities, those same biometrics are automatically checked against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration databases so the federal government can determine immigration consequences — but that does not mean every state database contains a discrete immigration-status field [2]. Federal immigration systems, by contrast, log citizenship and encounter-level information across ICE, CBP and EOIR and publish summary tables and transactional datasets that include citizenship and criminality markers [6] [7].
2. Which states record immigration status in arrest/conviction files
Published research and data inventories point to Texas as the single U.S. state documented to date that records criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status for research purposes; Migration Policy highlights Texas’ unique publicly reported linkage as the only state example in the literature [1]. No comprehensive source in the provided reporting documents a broader list of states that maintain structured immigration-status fields in their routine criminal court or arrest databases; this absence is itself an important finding supported by TRAC’s emphasis on agency-specific databases and the complexity of cross-agency data sharing [8] [9].
3. How researchers can access usable immigration‑by‑criminality data
Researchers should prioritize federal enforcement datasets and established aggregators: TRAC provides immigration tools and monthly immigration-court and enforcement extracts useful for linking non‑citizen criminal histories to immigration outcomes [8] [10]; the Deportation Data Project collects and republishes public, anonymized government enforcement datasets and FOIA releases useful for tracing individual pathways through arrest, detention and removal [4] [11] [3]. DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics (OHSS) publishes monthly tables on enforcement that include citizenship and criminality breakdowns that are often the most accessible official summary source [7] [6].
4. FOIA, A-files and transactional records — the practical route
When federal or state public portals lack the needed fields, formal record requests are the main path: file FOIA requests with DHS components (ICE, CBP), USCIS for A-file records, or the FBI for fingerprint-based criminal history checks, following agency guidance on FOIA submissions [12] [13] [5]. The Deportation Data Project documents that many administrative datasets are released only ad hoc after FOIA litigation or requests and warns of long agency backlogs and redactions; the immigration courts’ monthly dataset is an exception that is proactively published [3].
5. Limitations, caveats and alternate explanations
Available sources show a patchwork: federal systems capture citizenship and are linkable to arrests through biometrics, but state criminal databases rarely publish a stand‑alone immigration-status field for researchers, leaving most comparative work dependent on inferred matches or single-state exceptions like Texas [2] [1] [6]. Researchers should therefore expect anonymization, deduplication issues, FOIA delays, and legal privacy exemptions to shape what can be obtained; specialized clearinghouses (TRAC, Deportation Data Project) reduce the technical burden but are themselves shaped by the datasets agencies decide to release [8] [4] [3].