The Chasm: Immigration Enforcement and the Distance Between Narrative and Data
- Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.
We are living in a cultural moment where sophistry, speculation, and opinionated talking points have overtaken the collective psyche. Truth-telling has become a rarity, and most of what passes for public discourse is little more than ideological posturing dressed up as conviction. I refuse to participate in that. I am not going to make assertions as though my evaluation emerges from my own thinking void of reliable, documented evidence. What follows is grounded in the data, and the sources are listed at the end for anyone with the intellectual honesty to examine them.
We need to have an honest conversation about what we’re actually looking at in the current immigration enforcement climate, because the gap between the narrative and the data is not a small one. It is a chasm.
The research on immigrant crime rates is not ambiguous, and it is not new. It spans 150 years of U.S. Census data. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants specifically, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.
They always have. I want to be precise here, because one common deflection is to claim that data on immigrants broadly is being used to obscure the question of those who are undocumented. It is not. The state of Texas tracks criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status. The National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, published a study using that Texas data and found that undocumented immigrants had lower offending rates than native-born citizens for violent crime, drug crime, and property crime. Their homicide arrest rate was less than half that of U.S.-born citizens across the entire study period. This is not aggregate data blurring the categories. This is status-specific data from the federal government’s own research institute.
Between 1980 and 2022, the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled while the total crime rate dropped by over 60 percent. Native-born citizens are ten times more likely to be incarcerated for weapons offenses, five times more likely for violent offenses, and more than twice as likely for property crimes. Even the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank with no progressive axe to grind, found that undocumented immigrants are roughly half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and that pattern held every single year from 2010 through 2023.
Criminologists call it the “immigration effect.” In communities with higher immigrant populations, crime rates, particularly homicide rates, are consistently lower. If the “migrant crime wave” narrative were true, it would show up in the numbers. It does not. Crime is not going up. Between 2023 and 2024, violent crime fell by over 10 percent. It is continuing a decades-long downward trajectory even as immigration has grown.
Now, some will argue that the border crossings of 2023 and 2024 represent something categorically new, and that the data simply hasn’t caught up. This sounds reasonable until you examine it. The most recent violent crime data available does cover this period, and it shows continued decline.
More to the point, this same argument has been made about every wave of immigration in American history, from the Chinese to the Irish to the Italians to the Mexicans. It has never once been borne out by the evidence, and the burden of proof does not rest on 150 years of consistent data. It rests on those making the extraordinary claim that this time is different.
Others will shift the frame to fentanyl and drug trafficking, arguing that even if immigrants are not committing violent crimes, the border crisis is fueling a drug epidemic that kills tens of thousands. This deserves a serious response. The data from the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that the majority of fentanyl enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through migrants crossing between them, and is primarily smuggled by U.S. citizens recruited by criminal networks. Conflating immigration enforcement with counter-narcotics strategy is not only inaccurate, it actively undermines effective drug interdiction by diverting resources from where the actual trafficking occurs.
Does any of this mean that no undocumented immigrant has ever committed a violent crime? Of course not. Every violent crime is a tragedy for the victim and their community, and nothing in this piece minimizes that. But policy cannot be driven by anecdote weaponized as statistic. When a single horrific case is used to characterize an entire population, we are no longer in the realm of public safety. We are in the realm of propaganda. And the same standard applied consistently would indict native-born citizens far more severely, because by every available measure, they offend at higher rates.
The framing of immigration enforcement as a public safety emergency has no basis in the empirical record. It is a politically constructed narrative, and we should have the courage to say so plainly.
Now consider what this narrative is being used to justify. ProPublica has documented at least 170 detentions of U.S. citizens by immigration agents, and that is almost certainly an undercount because the government does not even track how many of its own citizens it detains. The CATO Institute has confirmed that the administration is engaging in racial profiling, and their analysis of leaked ICE data revealed that 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody had no criminal convictions of any kind. Only 5 percent had violent criminal convictions. So much for “the worst of the worst.” When DHS was confronted with CATO’s findings, they called the data “made up.” CATO then published the raw data, sourced directly from ICE’s own records, and proved that DHS had lied about its own numbers.
The administration’s standard defense is that any U.S. citizens detained were obstructing operations or assaulting agents. A Senate subcommittee investigated these claims and found that they are frequently contradicted by video evidence, and that agents routinely make spurious assault allegations to justify detentions that were based on appearance. An American combat veteran was held for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s birthday. A young man in Minneapolis was confronted by agents while shoveling snow in his mother’s driveway because they heard him speaking a foreign language. In Downey, California, a thriving community that is 75 percent Latino, Mexican Americans now carry their passports just to go about their daily lives. These are not people who obstructed anything. They were going about the ordinary business of being American.
The administration’s own border czar has acknowledged making “collateral arrests” of “many” American citizens and admitted that agents detain people based on their “physical appearance.” The head of Border Patrol said to a white reporter, “How do they look compared to, say, you?” That is not a dog whistle. That is the quiet part said out loud.
Some will argue that sanctuary city policies are hiding the real numbers by preventing cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents. The research addresses this directly. A study by the Center for American Progress found that counties with sanctuary policies average 35.5 fewer crimes per 10,000 people than counties that cooperate with ICE detainer requests. Studies published in the International Migration Review and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that sanctuary jurisdictions honor ICE detainers for immigrants with criminal convictions at the same rate as those without such policies. What sanctuary policies actually do is increase the willingness of immigrant communities to report crimes and cooperate with local police, which makes everyone in those communities safer.
Eliminating those policies does not reveal hidden crime. It creates it, by driving vulnerable populations underground where they become easier targets for exploitation and less likely to seek help.
The Brookings Institution has documented that two U.S. citizens were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis in early 2026, that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, and that in over 50 cases ICE has allegedly busted out car windows to justify arrests. Meanwhile, FBI agents, DEA agents, and ATF agents are being pulled from counterterrorism, drug enforcement, and firearms investigations to assist with deportation operations. The New York Times reported that federal criminal law enforcement is neglecting its core functions, including in some cases letting sex traffickers go free, in order to conduct mass deportations. By 2028, according to the CATO Institute’s analysis, roughly 80 percent of all federal law enforcement dollars will go to immigration enforcement, and primarily it will fund deportations of people without any criminal record or arrest record. That is not a public safety strategy. It is the gutting of one.
When enforcement activity wildly exceeds any rational proportion to the problem it claims to address, when citizens are detained based on the color of their skin and the language they speak, when the government refuses to track its own violations and denies them in the face of documented evidence, when it lies about its own data and retaliates against the institutions that expose the lie, we are not looking at law enforcement. We are looking at the machinery of a political project that consolidates power through fear and the identification of a scapegoated other. That is an old, old pattern, and those of us with any prophetic conscience should be naming it for what it is.
Sources:
American Immigration Council, “Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime” (2024) — https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunking-myth-immigrants-and-crime/
Northeastern University, “Data is Clear That Immigrants Don’t Increase Crime” (2025) — https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/01/15/immigrant-crime-united-states/
American Immigration Council, “Immigrants Do Not Commit More Crimes in the US” (2025) — https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/immigrants-do-not-commit-more-crimes-in-the-us-despite-fearmongering/
National Institute of Justice (U.S. Department of Justice), “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate” — https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate
Migration Policy Institute, “Explainer: Immigrants and Crime in the United States” (2025) — https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/immigrants-and-crime
CBS Austin Fact Check, “Do Illegal Migrants Commit More Crime Than American Citizens?” (2025) — https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/fact-check-team-do-illegal-migrants-commit-more-crime-than-american-citizens-dhs
American Economic Review, “The Immigration-Crime Link: 150 Years of Data” (2024) — https://www.aeaweb.org/research/chart/incarceration-immigrants-us-born
Northwestern University / American Economic Review, “Immigrants Are Significantly Less Likely to Commit Crimes” (2024) — https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/03/immigrants-are-significantly-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-the-us-born/
Criminology (PMC), “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6241529/
ProPublica, “More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents” (2025) — https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will
Axios, “ICE Accused of Racial Profiling in Detentions of Latino U.S. Citizens” (2025) — https://www.axios.com/2025/07/09/ice-us-citizens-detention-racial-profiling
NPR, “Fact Checks Kristi Noem on ICE Detaining US Citizens” (2025) — https://www.npr.org/2025/11/05/nx-s1-5598373/npr-fact-checks-kristi-noem-on-ice-detaining-us-citizens
CATO Institute, “One in Five ICE Arrests Are Latinos on the Streets with No Criminal Past or Removal Order” (2025) — https://www.cato.org/blog/1/5-ice-arrests-are-latinos-streets-no-criminal-past-or-removal-order
CATO Institute, “5% of People Detained by ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (2025) — https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions
CATO Institute, “New Data Prove DHS Lied About Cato Report on ICE” (2025) — https://www.cato.org/blog/new-data-prove-dhs-lied-about-cato-report-ice
U.S. Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee Report on ICE Detentions of U.S. Citizens (2025) — https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025.12.8_ICE-Report-revised-FINAL.pdf
Brookings Institution, “ICE Expansion Has Outpaced Accountability: What Are the Remedies?” (2026) — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ice-expansion-has-outpaced-accountability-what-are-the-remedies/
Written by Mark J. Chironna, PhD.
Dr. Mark Chironna is a public scholar, executive and personal coach, and thought leader with five decades of experience in leadership development, cultural analysis, and future-focused strategies. With advanced degrees in Psychology, Applied Semiotics and Futures Studies, and Theology, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to helping individuals and organizations navigate complexity, unlock potential, and craft innovative solutions.
As a Board Certified Coach with over 30,000 hours of experience, he empowers leaders and teams to thrive through resilience, foresight, and actionable strategies. Passionate about human flourishing, he integrates psychological insight and cultural trends to inspire growth and transformation.
WEBSITE:: www.markchironna.com
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