How many US citizens were killed by undocumented immigrants in 2025?

1. What the data landscape actually is

Independent researchers and fact‑checkers have repeatedly concluded that there are no comprehensive national statistics on crimes specifically committed by unauthorized immigrants, and therefore no defensible single‑number total for killings by undocumented immigrants in any year, including 2025 ^[1]. Government sources like CBP publish enforcement and criminal‑alien statistics for border encounters and convictions but do not produce a validated annual count of U.S. citizen homicide victims broken down by the immigration status of suspects ^[5]. Academics who study homicide and immigration point out that arrest and conviction rates for serious violent crime among undocumented immigrants are not higher than for U.S.‑born residents, underscoring the limits of using partial incident counts to draw bigger conclusions ^{[1] [6]}.

2. What the federal government and DHS have publicly highlighted

The Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Noem has publicly released examples of U.S. citizens killed in incidents involving noncitizens — for example, DHS named Robert Boles and Katie Abraham as 2025 victims of fatal vehicle crashes attributed to noncitizen drivers and relaunched the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office to spotlight such cases ^[2]. DHS later issued additional profiles in August 2025 describing violent attacks and sexual crimes attributed to noncitizens, which the department used to justify policy and outreach initiatives ^[3]. These are individual, documented instances used for advocacy and commemoration, not a comprehensive statistical accounting ^{[2] [3]}.

3. What press, advocacy groups, and legislators have produced

Media outlets, immigrant‑rights organizations, and lawmakers each compile incident lists for different aims: outlets like The Guardian have focused on deaths in ICE custody and systemic mortality in detention rather than homicides of U.S. citizens by undocumented people ^[7]. Advocacy groups such as the American Immigration Council have catalogued detention‑related deaths to criticize enforcement policies ^[8]. Meanwhile, some senators sponsoring punitive legislation publicly list violent crimes by noncitizens as a rationale for tougher penalties, citing individual cases from 2024–25 to support bills proposed in 2025 ^[4]. Those collections overlap but are selective and motivated by policy goals, making them unsuitable as a neutral nationwide count ^{[7] [8] [4]}.

4. What numbers can and cannot be stated with confidence

It is possible to cite documented individual cases publicized by DHS and lawmakers — for instance, Robert Boles and Katie Abraham were named by DHS as 2025 victims in crashes involving noncitizen drivers ^[2] — but it is not possible, based on the provided reporting, to sum all documented incidents into an accurate national figure for 2025. Reuters’ fact‑check explicitly warns against widely circulated claims of thousands of annual deaths attributed to undocumented immigrants and stresses the absence of national tracking ^[1]. Therefore any single total offered without comprehensive, transparent methodology would be speculative and likely misleading ^[1].

5. Why this matters: incentives, gaps and what to watch next

Counting homicides by perpetrator immigration status is politically charged: agencies and politicians highlight victims to advance policy, while researchers and advocates emphasize methodological gaps and comparative crime rates to avoid misleading conclusions ^{[2] [1] [4]}. The most useful next steps for a verifiable count would be either a federal mandate to track victims by perpetrator immigration status with clear definitions, or large, peer‑reviewed datasets that reconcile local law enforcement, coroner, and immigration records — neither of which existed in the reporting provided for 2025 ^{[1] [5]}.