How many illegal immigrants have committed crimes over the last 5 years
Executive summary
A direct, authoritative total for “how many illegal (undocumented) immigrants committed crimes over the last five years” does not exist in the public record provided; federal enforcement datasets and scholarly reviews instead offer partial measures and rate comparisons that point away from a simple mass of criminality [1] [2] [3]. Available government tallies—such as ICE removals for criminal accusations or CBP “criminal alien” encounter summaries—document many incidents but are neither comprehensive nor comparable to population-based crime counts used in criminology [4] [1].
1. What the question actually asks and the limits of counting
The user is asking for a single numeric tally across a heterogeneous population and many legal contexts, but the sources show that no unified national register exists that counts “crimes committed by undocumented immigrants” in the same way that police and research agencies count offenses for the general population; enforcement records capture encounters, convictions prior to interdiction, or removals—not a population-wide incidence measure—so a headline number cannot be credibly produced from the documents at hand [1] [2] [4].
2. Official enforcement figures and what they measure
Border and immigration enforcement agencies publish counts of “criminal aliens,” removals, and prosecutions—CBP’s enforcement statistics summarize Border Patrol encounters and whether arrested noncitizens have prior convictions recorded in law enforcement databases, but the agency defines “criminal alien” narrowly and the statistics reflect database-recorded convictions, not an incidence rate across the undocumented population [1] [2]. ICE removal statistics show tens of thousands of removals for people accused or convicted of crimes in single years (for example, removals fell to about 45,432 in 2021 from higher counts earlier), but removals track enforcement activity and policy priorities as much as criminality itself [4].
3. Academic and policy research on relative rates
Multiple scholarly reviews and policy analyses consistently find that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—have lower rates of criminal offending, incarceration, and arrests than U.S.-born residents, and that increases in the undocumented population have not produced higher violent-crime rates in national or city-level studies [5] [6] [3] [7] [8]. Studies cited by policy groups and research centers report that undocumented individuals are often substantially less likely to be arrested for violent or property crimes than native-born citizens, and some long-term analyses show immigration can correlate with lower crime rates in receiving communities [9] [3] [6].
4. Conflicting indicators and selective use of data
Some commentators and older studies emphasize enforcement-era aggregates—such as a Government Accountability Office analysis that attributed large absolute counts of offenses to noncitizens in an earlier period—to argue for a sizable criminal contribution from undocumented people, but those numbers span years, depend on which populations and facilities were sampled, and predate recent academic syntheses showing lower per-capita offending rates [4]. In practice, enforcement counts, removal totals, and academic rate-based estimates point in different directions because they answer different questions: how many encounters/removals happened versus how common crime is among a given population [4] [1] [3].
5. Why no single five‑year number is available and how to interpret proxies
A credible five‑year total would require consistent definitions (who counts as “illegal”), linkage across local, state and federal records, and population denominators to convert counts into rates; the sources show those pieces are fragmented—CBP statistics capture convictions recorded at interdiction, ICE removal counts reflect enforcement priorities, and research uses surveys and criminal-justice datasets to estimate rates—so any attempt to sum disparate counts would mislead [1] [2] [4] [3]. The safer empirical takeaway from the available literature is not a single cumulative count but a robust pattern: undocumented immigrants are not driving higher crime rates and generally exhibit lower offending rates than native-born populations [5] [6] [3] [7].
6. Bottom line for readers and policymakers
There is no authoritative public total in the cited sources that answers “how many illegal immigrants have committed crimes over the last five years”; enforcement datasets provide partial counts of encounters and removals (e.g., tens of thousands of removals for accused or convicted individuals in single years), while academic literature consistently shows lower per-capita crime among immigrants, including those undocumented, than among U.S.-born residents—meaning policy discussions should weigh enforcement counts against population-based rates and data limitations rather than treat any single enforcement number as the comprehensive answer [4] [1] [3] [5].