The Trump campaign and allies of the former president are distorting official Homeland Security statistics on undocumented immigrants with criminal records, claiming that thousands of these migrants have come in during the Biden administration when, in reality, the numbers that they’re citing span decades.
The data, which was released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Congress late last week, shows there are 13,099 immigrants with homicide convictions who are not currently jailed by ICE.
On Sunday in particular, Republican lawmakers seized this data to criticize Democrats, specifically Vice President Kamala Harris, whom former president Donald Trump has tried to portray as weak on the border as the election approaches.
For instance, Trump and his allies claimed that the 13,099 immigrants cited by ICE in a letter were “released” by Democrats and are “at large,” posing a danger to U.S. citizens. But Republicans are misinterpreting the ICE data, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.
The 13,099 immigrants with murder convictions cited by Trump and his allies are part of ICE’s “non-detained” docket. That’s a list of nearly 7 million people who have pending immigration cases before the agency but who are not jailed by ICE for various reasons — such as because they are currently incarcerated by federal, state or local authorities or because they have already served their criminal sentences but have not been deported.
Immigrants living in the United States illegally who commit crimes and go to prison are typically transferred to ICE custody once they complete their sentences here. ICE may try to immediately deport them to their home countries, but some have pending immigration cases and receive permission to remain in the United States while their claims are resolved.
An immigrant who commits a homicide at age 20 and completes a lengthy U.S. prison term could be allowed to remain in the United States upon release if a judge allows it; for example, because the person has U.S.-born children or other reasons.
The vast majority of the homicide convictions are not individuals who came into the country during the Biden administration: They are immigrants who have been added to ICE’s records over the past 40 years. Many of those on the list were added during the Trump administration.
“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration,” a DHS spokesperson told The Washington Post on Sunday.
The data first started circulating after acting ICE Director P.J. Lechleitner sent a letter on Wednesday replying to a request from Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.).
Lechleitner’s letter does not make clear how many of the 13,099 convicted murders on the agency’s non-detained list are in jail outside of ICE’s jurisdiction.
The number of cases on ICE’s non-detained docket nearly doubled during Biden’s presidency, when illegal border crossings reached record highs between 2021 and 2023.
The data in Lechleitner’s letter shows that, as of July 21, there were about 660,000noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket. Of those who are not being held by ICE, 425,431 are convicted criminals.
The data reported in the letter represents immigrants recorded over the past four decades, though the letter doesn’t specify when the record officially began.
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the American Immigration Council, noted on X, that number has gone up by 15 percent since 2015, when 368,574 convicted criminals not held by ICE were recorded.
Reichlin-Melnick also noted that many on this docket “have been here for decades” and “can’t be deported, often for diplomatic reasons.”
“Anyone on ICE’s non-detained docket with a homicide conviction has likely been in the country for decades, served a full criminal sentence, and can’t be removed because they’re from a country which restricts US deportations,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media. “There are others on ICE’s non-detained docket who have serious criminal records who, after serving their time, managed to win some form of protection and relief from removal. They are now here legally, but remain on the docket and are required to check in with ICE periodically.”
There is no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes at higher rates than U.S. citizens.
Over the weekend, Trump and his allies cited none of these details — including what Trump had done with the migrant backlog during his term in office.
Instead, during a rally on Saturday evening in the swing state of Wisconsin, several enlarged posters with images of migrants in orange jumpsuits were used as a stage backdrop. Trump falsely alleged that “13,099 convicted murderers have crossed the border and are free to roam and kill in our country” under the Biden administration and tried to tie the problem to Harris’s actions as vice president, falsely labeling her the “border czar.”
On Sunday, Trump once again cited the distorted statistics during a rally in Erie, Pa. Earlier in the day, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated the same false claim, saying in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Biden administration “just acknowledged that they released more than 13,000 convicted murderers who illegally entered this country.”
Democrats have sought to explain what the data really represents.
“That’s a misleading number,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told “Fox News Sunday.” “Those 13,000 convicted of homicide, they may not be in ICE custody, but most of them are in prison, state, federal or local prisons and will be deported as soon as they finish serving their prison terms under the Biden-Harris administration.”
The Biden-Harris administration, he added, “have prioritized the deportation of those who’ve committed violent crimes and have, in fact, deported them at a 50 percent higher rate than under former president Trump, who didn’t make that a key priority.”
In his letter to Gonzales, Lechleitner added that the Department of Homeland Security is “removing and returning record numbers of migrants who are unable to establish a legal basis to remain in the United States, and prioritizing for removal those who present national security and public safety risks, and recent border crossers.”
Harris, who visited the southern border Friday, noted that the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of senators have tried to address DHS’s backlog in the processing of many detention and deportation cases by securing additional funding for the department. But that failed, she said, after Trump urged congressional allies to torpedo a tough bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year. She also took aim at Trump’s record while in office and his current harsh rhetoric about immigrants.
“In the four years Donald Trump was president, he did nothing to solve our immigration problems,” Harris said. “He separated families. He ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protections for dreamers. He made the challenges at the border worse. And he is still fanning the flames of fear and division.”
Meryl Kornfield contributed reporting.