How many illegal immigrants have killed in the US from 2000 and
Executive summary
No reliable, authoritative tally exists in the public record that counts “how many illegal immigrants have killed in the U.S. from 2000” because the federal government does not maintain a comprehensive, national dataset linking immigration status to homicide convictions across all states and years, and only a few jurisdictions systematically record immigration status in arrest or conviction records [1] [2]. Available state-level work (notably Texas) and a broad body of social-science research consistently find that undocumented immigrants commit homicide at rates equal to or lower than native-born Americans, but these studies stop short of producing a simple national cumulative total from 2000 onward [1] [3] [4] [5].
1. No single federal source counts homicides by immigration status
The Department of Justice, FBI, CDC, and other national crime-statistics repositories generally do not include reliable markers of immigration status for homicide suspects or convicts, which prevents a straightforward national count; U.S. Customs and Border Protection publishes “criminal alien” enforcement summaries for recent fiscal years but those are not comprehensive homicide tallies back to 2000 and rely on database checks at apprehension rather than systematic tracking of all crimes nationwide [2] [6]. Reuters’ fact-checking work underscores the data gap and debunks viral claims such as “4,000 people killed yearly by undocumented immigrants,” noting there is no evidence for that figure and pointing out methodological problems when people try to extrapolate from incomplete data [1].
2. What the jurisdictions that do track status show — Texas as the key example
Texas is widely cited because it is among the only states that explicitly logs immigration status in arrest records for many crimes; analyses using Texas data find homicide conviction rates for undocumented immigrants that are lower than for U.S.-born residents — for example, one Cato analysis covering 2013–2022 reports a homicide conviction rate for “illegal immigrants” of roughly 2.2 per 100,000 compared with 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Texans, and noted counts such as 67 homicide convictions by undocumented people in Texas in 2022 [1] [7]. Those state-level datapoints are informative but cannot be straightforwardly summed into a reliable national total for 2000–present because most states do not collect the same immigration-status fields or make them publicly available [1] [3].
3. The academic literature: lower rates, not higher totals
A substantial academic literature — including peer-reviewed studies summarized by the National Institute of Justice, Migration Policy Institute, and others — finds that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, generally have lower offending and homicide rates than native-born Americans and that increases in undocumented populations have not been shown to drive up violent crime rates nationally [3] [4] [8] [5]. These studies focus on rates (incidents per population) rather than producing a cumulative raw count of homicide perpetrators identified as undocumented since 2000, which is a different measurement task and one limited by the administrative data available [8] [4].
4. How figures get inflated and political narratives shape perception
Because a national raw count is unavailable, activists and pundits sometimes produce large-sounding numbers by extrapolating from thin slices of data or by equating “criminal aliens encountered by Border Patrol” with a nationwide homicide roster; Reuters and the Brennan Center warn that such extrapolations are methodologically unsound and that politically motivated outlets (e.g., some think tanks and opinion pieces) selectively cite incidents to build a narrative of a “migrant crime wave” that the empirical literature does not support [1] [5] [9]. Conversely, advocacy groups and researchers emphasize methodological limits and point to robust evidence that immigration has not increased violent crime and that immigrants often have lower incarceration and homicide rates [10] [11].
5. Bottom line: an exact national total since 2000 is not supportable from available public sources
The reporting and studies provided do not permit a defensible answer in the form “X illegal immigrants killed Y people in the U.S. from 2000 to [now],” because federal statistics do not track immigration status comprehensively and only fragmented state or agency data (notably Texas and selected CBP enforcement summaries) exist; the best-supported empirical conclusion from the available literature is that undocumented immigrants are not responsible for disproportionate levels of homicide relative to their share of the population, but a precise cumulative count since 2000 cannot be produced from the supplied sources [1] [3] [2] [4].