How many Americans, like Laken Riley, who are permanently separated from their families annually by the illegal aliens who murder them.
Executive summary
There is no reliable, authoritative figure in the open reporting that states how many Americans are “permanently separated from their families annually by the illegal aliens who murder them”; public sources instead provide fragmented, inconsistent counts and analyses that do not support the large, round-number claims circulating in politics and social media [1] [2] [3]. Available government and academic materials show homicide is tracked, immigrant status is sometimes recorded, and some agencies highlight victims of crimes by noncitizens — but none of the provided sources deliver a nationally validated annual count of U.S. citizens murdered specifically by people who were in the country unlawfully [4] [2] [5].
1. What the question is actually asking and why it’s hard to answer
The user seeks an annual tally of U.S. “permanent separations” (homicide victims) where the perpetrator was an “illegal alien,” a query that requires three linked data points — official identification of homicide victims, reliable determination of each perpetrator’s immigration status, and aggregation of those cases on a national, annual basis — a data chain that the existing reporting and public datasets do not consistently provide [4] [2] [6].
2. What public sources do provide: partial snapshots, not a national annual total
Some data sources and reports offer partial insights: the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) provides detailed homicide case data for participating states and was used to analyze 9,428 homicides in 2017 across 32 states and D.C., but NVDRS coverage is not a straightforward nationwide count of homicides by immigration status [4]. Immigration enforcement agencies and advocacy reporting produce other figures — for example, ICE told Congress and NBC News that more than 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide (either domestically or abroad) live outside ICE detention in the U.S., a cumulative stock figure rather than an annual flow of murders attributed to people in the country unlawfully [2].
3. What rigorous research finds about immigrants and homicide rates
Multiple academic reviews and crime–immigration studies find that immigrants — including undocumented immigrants in many analyses — do not have higher homicide or violent crime rates than native-born Americans and often have lower rates; peer-reviewed work and syntheses indicate no empirical basis for claims that undocumented immigrants cause a large, additional annual homicide toll beyond overall homicide statistics [7] [8] [3]. Reuters’ fact check specifically concluded there is no evidence that 4,000 Americans are killed each year by undocumented immigrants, a widely repeated viral claim [1].
4. How political messaging and selective counts muddy the picture
Federal agencies and advocacy organizations emphasize different frames: DHS and VOICE highlight victims of crimes by “illegal aliens” to justify enforcement priorities and victim services [5], while immigration-reform and civil-rights groups emphasize research showing immigrants are not more violent and caution against extrapolating from high-profile cases to population-level rates [3] [9]. These contrasting agendas mean public figures cited in debate are often selective — presenting snapshots (convictions, cumulative counts, or anecdotes) that are not equivalent to an annually validated murder count of U.S. victims killed specifically by people in the country unlawfully [2] [5] [3].
5. Bottom line and limits of the record
The open reporting examined does not allow a precise annual number to be stated with confidence: there is no single, transparent national dataset cited here that enumerates U.S. homicide victims per year specifically attributable to perpetrators who were unlawfully present, and reputable fact-checking and peer-reviewed studies warn against the inflated claims that circulate in media and politics [1] [7] [8]. If policymakers or the public require such a figure, the gap is methodological and institutional: it would require consistent, nationwide recording of perpetrator immigration status, standardized definitions, and public release of annual aggregates — none of which the provided sources supply [4] [2].