() – Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump falsely claimed on Friday and Saturday that the statistics refer specifically to criminals who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; In reality, the figures refer to criminals who entered the US over several decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics refer specifically to people now living freely in the US; In fact, the numbers They include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.
“Kamala should immediately cancel her press conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our country during her three and a half year term as border czar,” Trump wrote. In a post on Friday, the day when Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed nearly 14,000 murderers to roam freely and openly through our country,” Trump wrote in another post from friday. They “roam free to kill again,” wrote, intensifying his rhetoric, on Saturday.
verifies: Trump’s claims are false in two major respects. First of allstatistics The ones he was referring to do not specifically refer to people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics refer to noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US, while appearing on the “non-detained list” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where some have been listed for years, even while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship does not allow the US to deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; They are on the list because they are not being held in a particular immigration detention center.
The new statistics, published by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, they say there were 425,431 total convicted felons on the no-detainee list as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions. The statistics were displayed by Trump and several republican legislators and right-wing commentators as alarming evidence of Harris’s alleged mismanagement of immigration policy. But in addition to exaggerating his role in the file—he was never actually a “border czar”—much of the verbiage inaccurately describes what the statistics show.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in an email Saturday: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; They include people who entered the country in the last 40 years or more. The custody determination for the vast majority of them was made long before this administration. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction of or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement.”
It is unclear how many of the 13,099 people with murder convictions on ICE’s non-detainee list as of July 21 are currently incarcerated in prisons and jails. Nevertheless, John Sandwega lawyer who was acting director of ICE during the Obama Administration, said in an interview this Saturday that it is “100% false” to claim that all homicide offenders on the non-detained list entered the United States during the vice presidency. of Harris. Sandweg added: “These are individuals who certainly entered the United States over a long period of time… Many of them have probably been on the list for 20 years, during which the U.S. has simply been unable to deport them.”
could not immediately find public statistics on how many people with criminal convictions were on the no-detainee list during Trump’s presidency. But there are public statistics from just before and after his presidency, and those statistics—which we will discuss later in this article—make clear that Trump also presided over a no-detention record that included hundreds of thousands of people with criminal convictions.
Trump’s posts left open the impression that the homicide offenders on the non-detainee docket had homicide convictions abroad but were nonetheless allowed to cross the U.S. border and live freely in this country. Actually, public data make it clear that the overwhelming majority of people with criminal convictions on non-detainee records were convicted in the US, like Sandweg and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior investigator at the US Immigration Council, which supports immigration, they told .
Why are these people not detained if they have been convicted of a crime as serious as homicide? Pursuant to a decision of the Supreme Court of 2001, The United States Government cannot hold a person in immigration detention indefinitely after they have been ordered removed from the country. So if someone has served their criminal sentence for murder and is then ordered removed from the United States, but your country does not cooperate with the United States on immigration matters and does not accept him back, he must be released to the United States.
“Let’s say there is a Russian convicted of murder. There is nothing we can do,” Sandweg said, since Russia simply does not accept deportation. “There comes a point where you just have to release them.” He added that this does not mean the person is “completely free” — people on non-detainee docket often have to register with ICE or be electronically monitored — “but there is simply no more legal authority to continue detention.”
Sandweg added: “ICE, of course, is not lightly saying, ‘Okay, people convicted of murder, you’re not a priority.’… We have a guy convicted of murder, our firm preference is not to release him on the street.”
Reichlin-Melnick, who pointed out on Saturday on social networks that the file of non-detainees includes people in jails and prisons, wrote in X on Friday that “anyone on ICE’s non-detainee file with a homicide conviction has likely been in the country for decades, has served a full criminal sentence, and cannot be removed because they are from a country that restricts deportations from the U.S. .”
Reichlin-Melnick continued: “There are others on the ICE non-detainee list who have serious criminal records and who, after serving their sentence, were granted some type of protection and exemption from removal. They are now here legally, but they remain on the list and must periodically report to ICE.”
The record of convicted criminals on the non-detainee list includes both people who crossed the border illegally and people who came to the United States legally, for example with a visa or a green card, and then committed a crime and were subdued. to expulsion proceedings or received an expulsion order.
The “non-detained” file is not a new creation of the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, there were hundreds of thousands of people with criminal convictions on non-detainee records during Trump’s presidency as well.
A reporter from Fox News, the right-wing outlet, whose reporting on these statistics Trump repeatedly promoted on Fridaynoted that same day evening on social media that “not all of these criminals came in during the Biden Administration, as some are claiming” and that “some of these criminals go back many years through multiple administrations.”
A previous official federal report noted that there were a total of 368,574 convicted felons on the non-detained list in August 2016, under the Obama administration, about five months before Trump became president. AND other federal document said there were a total of 405,786 convicted felons on the non-detained list as of early June 2021, less than five months into the Biden-Harris administration. Again, the July 2024 figure was 425,431 convicted criminals in total.
In other words, the list grew about 10% between August 2016 and June 2021 — a roughly five-year period that included all four years of the Trump administration — and then grew about another 5% in the three-plus years under the Biden-Harris administration between June 2021 and July 2024.
Since official information on people with criminal convictions who have not been detained has only been released sporadically, with dates that do not coincide with the start and end dates of presidential administrations, it is not possible to say how much of the increase occurred under the Trump administration versus which part occurred during the final months of the Obama administration and the first months of the Biden-Harris administration.
In any case, there is no basis for saying, as Trump continued to claim on Friday, that all of the people in the docket with murder convictions occurred during the Biden-Harris administration, and the numbers show that “the docket certainly grew under the administration.” Trump,” Sandweg said. (He added that, to be fair, Trump faced the same problems with uncooperative foreign countries as other presidents.)
Crimes committed by people on the non-detained list in July 2024 ranged from the most serious crimes, such as homicide and sexual assault, to “gambling,” “liquor,” and “obscenity” crimes. The categories of convictions with the highest number of people on the non-detained list were “traffic violations” (77,074), “assault” (62,231), “dangerous drugs” (56,533) and “immigration” (51,933).
could not immediately find public data on the number of people with homicide convictions specifically who were on the non-arrest docket in previous years, including during the Trump administration.
It is evident that the total number of people not detained, including those who have not been criminally convicted, skyrocketed during the Biden-Harris administration. (There is numerous reasons why people may end up on the list; We will not go into them here). The ICE says that the list of cases rose from about 3.3 million in fiscal 2020, the last full fiscal year under Trump, to about 6.2 million in fiscal 2023.
Harris’s critics have a right to cite this actual increase. However, her presidential opponent criticizes her dishonestly.
‘s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this article.
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