Today there’s a big splash in the news, that (something-something-something) illegal immigrants have 13,000 convicted of homicide among them. This, based on what Rep. Gonzales posted on Twitter. You can see images of the original ICE letter.
That immediately struck me as odd. Number-wise. Very odd. For a few reasons.
First, that’s a lot.
The population that is drawn from is the roughly 7 million cases on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement “non-detained docket”. That is, persons pending (in effect) their deportation trial or hearing, that are not being held in custody, but instead have been sent out into the community while they await trial.
So, rough cut, that 13,000 works out to a rate of about 185/100,000 population. Where the population at issue is illegal immigrants who have are living in the community while awaiting their deportation trial.
Compare that to the annual homicide rate in the U.S., which works out to be about 6/100,000. Even then, only about half of homicide cases are ever resolved (i.e., somebody is convicted). So the number of persons convicted of homicide in the U.S. works out to be about 3/100,000. Restrict that to adults, and you could stretch that to 4/100,000 adults per year.
So the apparent rate of homicide conviction (or maybe just being accused of homicide) in this docket population appears to be about 50 times higher than I would have expected.
But …
Multiply by 3 for the high Latin America homicide rate. Homicide rates are higher in the countries that account for the bulk of souther-border immigration. So, where the U.S. runs about 6/100,000, the median for Latin America appears to be about 3 times that amount (per eyeballing Wikipedia).
Multiply by (say) 10 for the fact that this ICE number is lifetime history of having been charged with or convicted of homicide. The U.S. homicide statistics were per year, an annual rate. The ICE figure isn’t an annual rate. It’s “any history of” conviction or pending charges for homicide. But this is something akin to “ever been convicted or or charged with a homicide”, over their prior lifetime. A fudge factor of 10 years seems at least plausible, given the ridiculously large fraction of the U.S. population that has “a criminal record”, as opposed to persons charged in any one year (reference).
And at that point, the number starts to make sense. Those two adjustments:
- For the higher violent crime rate in typical countries of origin.
- For “any criminal record” versus “convicted last year”.
And those two factors take you from 3/100,000/year homicide convictions in the U.S., to an expected value of about (3 x 3 x 10 = ) to an expected rate of 90/100,000 with any history of homicide within a relatively young, mostly Latin-American population.
So, just assuming these are average Latin Americans, and that ICE has (belated) access their full criminal history, the ICE figures now begin to make sense. Just those two adjustments put you in the ballpark of their 13,000 murderers (180/100,000).
But “ICE Docket” is a wild card.
What’s a docket? That’s a list of pending ICE court cases. Where those cases are about whether or not to deport the person.
Now it all comes together. I think. Here’s my guess as to what’s going on.
First, as the original letter makes clear, if the ICE knows that an illegal immigrant in their custody has a history of serious crime, they do not let go of that person. For sure, convicted of murder would qualify. So this 13,000 is people that the ICE found out about, after-the-fact. How many were kept in detention, and so did not end up on this “docket”, is not known.
That factor, by itself, should have depressed the overall rate, and so does not explain why the observed rate is about twice what you would reasonably expect.
Second, it’s a good bet that “the docket” is enriched in individuals with history of serious crime, relative to other immigrants. That is, of the 7M persons currently on the ICE “docket”, a lot of those people will have some adjudications, and will move rapidly onto and off of the docket. By contrast, once the ICE finds out that an individual was convicted of a serious crime, that individual remains “on the docket” until that person is given a court order for deportation. And if that that person then does not obey that deportation order, they come back onto the docket and get convicted of failing to obey that court order.
What I’m saying is, it’s a good bet that those cases stay “on the docket” a lot longer than average. Which means that at any point in time, “the docket” is enriched in those cases, relative to plain-vanilla deportation hearings.
Just to drive that home, the mix of crimes on the ICE table (Twitter reference above) is oddly skewed. rom the same data source showing 13,000 murderers, there are just 77,000 convicted of a traffic offense. So, on the ICE docket, for every six persons convicted of a traffic offense, there’s one person who was convicted of murder.(?)
For the U.S. as a whole, by contrast, there are about 630,00 DUI convictions per year. (Calculated from the data table in this source.) Conversely, there appear to be about 10,000 homicide convictions per year (out of 22,000 or so homicides — the rest are unsolved.) So each year, the U.S. as a whole has 60 DUI convictions for every homicide conviction. Or about 10 times as many as show up among the immigrants on the ICE’s list.
So that’s a bit odd. Whatever the underlying list is, it doesn’t appear to be a cross-section of crime. It seems heavily skewed toward homicide.
Addendum, the next day, say no more: As it turns out, the ICE list contains people who are literally in state and federal prison, that is, not detained by ICE. Presumably, ICE continues to track them so that ICE can kick them out of the country when their prison term is up. Here’s a quote from CNN reporting on this issue, quoting the Department of Homeland Security:
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
Summary
All this tells me is that whatever you think this 13,000-murderers figure represents, it’s not the risk of murder in a given year.
To be clear, near as anyone can tell, the legal immigrant population is more law-abiding that average, and the illegal immigrant population is about as law-abiding (otherwise) as the U.S. native population. This, based on analysis of data from Texas, it was just over 2.2 individuals per 100,000 population, just a bit below the U.S. average.
Source: Cato institute
You could, in theory, I guess, avoid any chance of this happening by locking up everyone on the ICE docket — everyone awaiting a deportation hearing. Change the law so that you have to lock up all 7M people who are currently on the ICE docket, but have been released back into the community. Taking $50,000/person/year as a reasonable guess at the cost of incarceration (based on eyeballing this map), it would only cost about a third of a billion dollars per year. Plus some large up-front cost to triple the size of the U.S. prison system, which currently incarcerates just over 2M.
To be clear, you couldn’t just lock up that 13,000. That’s because, as noted above, their history of homicide conviction was not know at the time the ICE (briefly) held them. (If it had been known, ICE would not have let them go. They aren’t crazy, after all.) At the time they were in ICE custody, you don’t know which 13,000 persons had some prior (unknown-at-the-time) homicide conviction.
So to get them all, you’d have to lock up all of them. And good luck getting that decision past any reasonable judge, under current law. You’d likely have to amend the laws to make that legal.
None of this matters. Republicans have found a statistic that has really horrible optics, so they’re running with it. Whatever it means.
As with Haitians eating dogs, there’s no way they’re not going to flog that until their base loses interest. I’m guessing that, as Haitians-eating-pets was the theme for last week, and 13,000 murderers is going to be the theme for the week ahead.
But passing legislation to reduce the logjam in these court cases, and get these people out of the country sooner? I’m guessing the Dems aren’t going to be smart enough even to mention who is responsible for killing the legislation that would have helped resolve this issue, within the law. And the Republicans who killed a seemingly bipartisan attempt to address this huge backlog of cases are certainly never going to mention that they did that.
So, we’re up for another week of macho-sounding stuff on this issue, from the Right. But no attempts to address it.
It’s just too good a story to pass up. Even if the people telling it have no idea what it means. Or whether 13,000 is an unreasonably high or low number.
And, for sure, the folks flogging this are going to ignore any hard numbers on the rate of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S. Because those numbers don’t tell the story they want to tell.
This is the way my country works now.
