This brief article summarizes a research project that examined data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to estimate the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing violent and drug crimes compared to native-born U.S. citizens and documented immigrants; the sidebar provides information regarding the study’s data sources and research methodology, and a chart provides a visualization of overall offending rates by citizenship/documentation status for the time period of 2012 to 2018.
A recent National Institute of Justice-funded study examined data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to estimate the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The question of how often undocumented immigrants commit crimes is not easy to answer. 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 estimates in this study come from Texas criminal records that include the immigration status of everyone arrested in the state from 2012 to 2018. These data enabled researchers to separate arrests for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants from those committed by documented immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens. 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 crime rates of the three groups. It should be noted that arrest is a commonly used, but imperfect measure of crime that in part reflects law enforcement activity rather than actual offending rates.