Over the past week, former President Donald Trump has been making a bold claim: "Over 13,000, the exact number's 13,099, convicted illegal alien murderers are now on the loose," he said during a campaign rally on October 1. A few days before that, Trump wrote on Truth Social that "13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris'] three and a half year period as Border Czar."
That number comes from a letter that Rep. Tony Gonzales (R–Texas) shared on X last week. The letter, which is from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), describes the noncitizens on the agency's docket who have been convicted of or charged with crimes. There are currently 13,099 "non-detained" noncitizens on the docket who have been convicted of homicide, according to ICE.
Some, including Trump, have taken "non-detained" to mean "roaming free." But this is false.
"When ICE uses the term 'non-detained,' they mean not currently detained by ICE," noted Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, this week. "In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences." After that, Nowrasteh continues, "the government transfers them onto ICE's docket for removal from the United States."
There is a "small number of non-detained migrants" who have been convicted of homicide but can't be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn't have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but "non-detained" people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list "includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more," explained the Department of Homeland Security in a Saturday statement, "the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration."
The number of convicted criminals on ICE's nondetained docket hasn't grown significantly under President Joe Biden, reported The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler. In August 2016, five months before Trump took office, there were 368,574 on the docket; in June 2021, five months into Biden's presidency, there were 405,786; and in December 2022, nearly two years into Biden's presidency, there were 407,983.
As he campaigns ahead of the presidential election next month, Trump has routinely said outrageous, misleading, and false things about immigrants and crime. He often talks about a "migrant crime" wave and claims that it "is taking over America." Much like his migrant murderers claim, the true picture looks very different. Crime decreased in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas' Operation Lone Star busing activities, per NBC News. "The most recent significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020," Cato Institute Associate Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier told Reason in March, "when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year."
Trump paints a terrifying picture of migrants and migration, but the reality is far more nuanced and far less dangerous than he would suggest.
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