A good number of outlets are reporting on crime statistics this morning and how over the last several years the trends are changing dramatically . I’m a big believer that stats are made to be manipulated, and while that may be going on here, there is no doubt that the numbers reported are startling. I snatched this assessment from Breitbart this morning. I note that we have to get pretty far into the article until we learn that a very large number of these arrests were for immigration violations. I guess this goes to show that regardless of the source of the news, each of us has to assess for ourselves the biases of that source. The numbers are still staggering, but need to be understood in the context of increased federal activity in enforcing immigration law. Here’s Breitbart’s article (in part):
A report by DOJ finds that while federal arrests of U.S. citizens rose just ten percent between 1998 and 2018, federal arrests of non-U.S. citizens rose about 234 percent over the same period.
For example, in 1998, 63 percent of all federal arrests were of U.S. citizens, while non-U.S. citizens accounted for about 37 percent of all federal arrests. In 2018, about 64 percent of all federal arrests were of non-U.S. citizens — accounting for 24 percent of all federal drug arrests, 25 percent of all federal property arrests, and 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests.
U.S. citizens, on the other hand, make up a small minority of federal arrests today, accounting for only 36 percent of all federal arrests in 2018. The data is not broken down on how many of these U.S. citizens are naturalized citizens, foreign-born, and how many are native-born U.S. citizens.
Though non-U.S. citizens represent just seven percent of the total U.S. population, they accounted for 15 percent of all federal arrests and 15 percent of all prosecutions for non-immigration related crimes in 2018. This indicates that non-U.S. citizens were about 2.3 times as likely to be arrested or prosecuted for non-immigration related crimes.
Last year, about 85 percent of federal arrests of non-U.S. citizens were for immigration offenses, and another five percent of the arrests were for immigration-related offenses. For perspective, in 1998, about 19,556 non-U.S. citizens were arrested for immigration offenses. By 2018, that number has ballooned to nearly 106,000 arrests — more than five times, or a 441 percent increase, the total of just 20 years ago.