How many Americans were killed in 2025 by illegal immigrants?
Executive summary
There is no single, authoritative count in the provided reporting that answers how many Americans were killed in 2025 by people classified as “illegal immigrants”; federal agencies and independent researchers cited here either do not publish a nationwide tally linking homicide victims to perpetrators’ immigration status or publish different, partial datasets that cannot be summed into a reliable national number [1] [2] [3]. The available sources instead offer case lists, policy announcements and studies on rates of offending, but none provide a verified 2025 total of Americans killed by unlawful entrants or undocumented noncitizens [4] [5] [6].
1. What the official datasets do — and don’t — supply
U.S. Customs and Border Protection publishes “criminal alien” arrest and conviction summaries for fiscal years, which document records checks and convictions for noncitizens apprehended by Border Patrol, but these datasets are not structured to produce an annual national count of U.S. homicide victims attributable specifically to “illegal immigrants” in a calendar year like 2025 [1] [7]. The National Institute of Justice and academic analyses emphasize the difficulty of determining crime rates by immigration status because most crime reporting systems and vital statistics do not reliably record or share immigration status for suspects or perpetrators, limiting the ability to derive an accurate national fatality total tied to undocumented status [2].
2. High-profile agency tallies and examples are not the same as a national total
Department of Homeland Security and its components routinely publish examples and honor individual victims of crimes committed by noncitizens and have relit the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office to draw attention to such cases, but those communications present selective cases and do not claim to enumerate every death nationally in 2025 [4] [8]. Similarly, legislative offices and some administration statements list individual alleged incidents to support policy proposals, but these lists are advocacy-driven and not an audited national count [5].
3. Related but distinct figures: deaths in custody and agency shootings
Some widely reported figures in 2025 concern deaths that are related to immigration enforcement itself rather than Americans killed by undocumented perpetrators: ICE reported 32 people died in custody in 2025, making it the agency’s deadliest year in decades — a tragic and significant statistic, but it documents detainee deaths, not U.S. civilian homicide victims killed by illegal entrants [6]. Separately, monitoring of shootings involving immigration agents documented a number of incidents and a small number of deaths tied to those encounters, yet those figures do not equal the number the question asks about [9].
4. What academic and fact‑checking sources say about the broader claim space
Independent researchers and fact‑checking outlets caution against viral claims that thousands of Americans are killed annually by undocumented immigrants; Reuters explicitly found no evidence for a frequently circulated claim that 4,000 people die each year at the hands of undocumented immigrants and highlighted studies showing lower homicide arrest and conviction rates for undocumented populations than for U.S.-born residents in some states like Texas [3] [10]. Migration Policy and the American Immigration Council materials compiled for 2024–2025 underscore that the question of immigrant involvement in crime is complex, with research generally showing undocumented immigrants are not more likely to commit violent crime than native‑born Americans, and that data limitations prevent simple, nationalized fatality counts [11] [12].
5. Bottom line and how to get closer to an answer
Based on the sources provided, a verifiable, single-number answer for “how many Americans were killed in 2025 by illegal immigrants” cannot be produced: federal enforcement statistics, media compilations and policy statements document incidents and trends but do not deliver a comprehensive, audited nationwide tally for calendar year 2025 [1] [6] [4] [5]. To move toward a defensible number would require cross-matching law‑enforcement homicide reports, medical examiner records and immigration-status determinations — datasets that the cited sources note are fragmented or not publicly linked [2] [3]. Until such a linkage is published and vetted, claims stating a precise 2025 death count attributable to illegal immigrants are not supported by the reporting supplied here.