President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin what he has described as the largest deportation operation in "American history" by ejecting undocumented migrants with a criminal history. But those who fit this criteria only make up a small fraction of the migrant population, a new analysis showed.
Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year— involving about 8,400 people— included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.
The figures don't include more than 400,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions in the past few decades, many of whom are being held in federal, state or local facilities. About 29,000 of felons have been convicted of homicide or sexual assault. All of them would enter the deportation process in immigration— but not until after serving their sentences, Axios said.
There are roughly 24.5 million noncitizen immigrants in the U.S., including those here awaiting asylum decisions or otherwise lawfully in the country, according to the Pew Research Center. Immigration courts recorded 1,798,964 new cases from Oct. 1, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2024, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
Just 0.47% of those cases involved possible deportation on alleged criminal activity.
Trump's continued promises of deporting criminal migrants at large scales comes despite numerous studies showing that migrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born citizens, according to NPR.
Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people.
There is also state level research that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime.
Beyond incarceration rates, research also shows that there is no correlation between undocumented people living in an area and a rise in crime there. Recent investigations by The New York Times and The Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016 there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime in those communities.
But regardless of these numbers, Trump says he will marshal all resources for "the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history," the Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Trump's incoming border czar, Tom Homan, has told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that the new administration will "concentrate on the public safety and the national security threats first" under a mass deportation plan.
"We know a record number of people on the terrorist watch list have crossed this border. We know a record number of terrorists have been released in this country," Homan said.
They have declined repeatedly to address the low number of current immigration cases involving immigrants who've committed crimes.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Field Operations, the agency's largest component, arrested 19,242 noncitizens who have been convicted of crime in the U.S. or abroad in fiscal 2024, the agency said. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded 17,048 arrests of noncitizens who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S. or abroad in fiscal year 2024.
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