Which states have the highest rates of violent crime committed by illegal immigrants?

1. Why the simple question has a complicated answer: limits of the data

Public and academic sources repeatedly caution that measuring “violent crime by illegal immigrants” at the state level is hampered by definitional and data gaps: federal “criminal alien” tallies reflect individuals with prior convictions found in enforcement databases rather than a population-based crime rate by immigration status, and state reporting systems rarely produce consistent, population-adjusted rates that separate undocumented from legal immigrants and U.S.-born residents ^{[4] [5]}. As a result, headline claims that some states have the “highest rates” rely on raw counts, selective enforcement records, or politically framed datasets rather than comparable rates per capita adjusted for population and detection biases, a limitation stressed across analyses ^{[5] [4]}.

2. What the best empirical studies actually show

Research that uses comprehensive arrest and population data—most notably a Texas Department of Public Safety–based study published in PNAS—found undocumented immigrants have substantially lower arrest rates for violent felonies than native-born citizens in Texas, with U.S.-born citizens over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes than undocumented immigrants in that dataset ^[3]. Broad syntheses and explainers from Migration Policy and the American Immigration Council summarize a consistent pattern across U.S. studies and time: immigrants, including undocumented immigrants in many analyses, do not raise violent-crime rates and often have lower offending rates than U.S.-born populations ^{[6] [1]}.

3. Cross-checks and contrary signals: enforcement tallies and political narratives

Enforcement-oriented statistics—such as “criminal alien” summaries published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection—document convictions found during interdiction or post-apprehension record checks, and these are used politically to emphasize criminality among noncitizens; those counts do not, however, translate directly into state-level violent-crime rates among undocumented residents and can over-represent populations more exposed to enforcement ^[4]. The Brennan Center and other analysts note that political actions—like governors transporting migrants to other cities—have generated narratives of migrant-driven crime surges, but the empirical trend since 2022 in many jurisdictions has been flat or downward for violent crime, not a migrant-driven spike ^[7].

4. The balanced conclusion and what responsible reporting can and cannot say

Based on peer-reviewed and policy analyses available, there is no defensible, evidence-based list of “states with the highest rates of violent crime committed by illegal immigrants”; most rigorous studies find no positive association between undocumented immigration and violent crime and often find lower rates among undocumented populations ^{[8] [2] [3]}. It is accurate to report isolated high-profile cases of violent crimes by undocumented individuals—these do occur and are documented in enforcement records—but extrapolating a statewide ranking or a generalized “crime wave” is not supported by the research cited here ^{[9] [4]}. The main caveat: publicly available national and state data systems still lack a standardized, privacy-protecting mechanism to produce comparable, population-adjusted violent-crime rates by immigration status, so absolute certainty about state-by-state rankings remains elusive ^{[5] [4]}.