An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes, the National Institute of Justice reports. The question of how often undocumented immigrants commit crimes is not easy to answer but was conducted using Texas data, because Texas is the only state that requires documentation of immigrant status as part of its criminal justice system. Most previous research on crime commission by immigrant populations has been unable to differentiate undocumented immigrants from documented immigrants. As a result, most studies treat all immigrants as a uniform group, regardless of whether they are in the country legally.
The researchers tracked these three groups’ arrest rates across seven years (2012-2018) and examined specific types of crime, including homicides and other violent crimes. They used these arrest rates as proxies for the rates of crime commission for the three groups. During this time, undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types, with documented immigrants generally falling between the other two groups. Researchers also looked specifically at homicide arrest trends. These rates tend to fluctuate more than the overall violent crime arrest rates because murders are relatively rare compared to other crimes. In addition, a large share of homicides go unsolved. Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide. The homicide rate for documented immigrants fluctuated. Sometimes it was higher than the rate for U.S.-born citizens and sometimes it was lower.