Majority of Federal Arrestees are Foreigners, Thousands of “Unknown Citizenship”

Months after the U.S. Sentencing Commission revealed most federal crimes are executed by Hispanics and involve immigrants and drugs, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reports that foreigners accounted for the vast majority of federal arrests last year. Furthermore, apprehensions in the five judicial districts along the Mexican border, home to a quarter of all drug cases in 2018, have nearly doubled in the last decade. It doesn’t end there; the number of Central Americans captured by federal authorities in the five border districts tripled in one year alone and has risen 30-fold in the last two decades. During the same period, the apprehension of Mexican citizens also increased significantly.

The disturbing figures were released this month by the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the government agency responsible for collecting crime data. In a 25-page report the agency outlines a distressing trend of criminal activity involving foreign nationals, revealing that non-U.S. citizens accounted for 64% of all federal arrests in 2018. “From 1998 to 2018, the share of all federal arrests by country of citizenship rose from 28% to 40% for Mexican citizens, rose from 1% to 20% for citizens of Central American countries, and fell from 63% to 36% for U.S. citizens,” the DOJ report states. The document uses tables and graphs to show an alarming increase in immigration crimes, from 20,942 back in 1998 to 58,031 in 2017 and an astonishing jump to 108,667 by 2018, marking a breathtaking 418.9% increase in two decades.

The five judicial districts along the Mexican border—California, Arizona, New Mexico and western and southern Texas—have experienced an eye-popping 539.6% in immigration-related arrests in the last two decades. Thousands are of “unknown citizenship,” according to the federal statistics, which show a spike of 202 aliens from unknown countries to 6,657 in a few years. Besides immigration violations, drug offenses appear to be the most popular crimes committed by non-U.S. citizens, followed by fraud, alien smuggling and misuse of visas. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators are young men like the ones marching north in the Central American caravan. Judicial Watch traveled to the Guatemala-Honduras border last fall and reported that the caravan mostly included young men. Guatemalan authorities confirmed that human smugglers, violent gang members and other criminal elements are incorporated in the highly organized caravans and the federal statistics indicate it’s a problem that predates the latest convoy.

The updated figures from the DOJ come just a few months after a separate government report disclosed that most federal crimes are executed by Hispanics, involve immigrants and drugs. In that equally alarming document, the U.S. Sentencing Commission disclosed that nearly half of all federal crimes in the United States are perpetrated by foreigners who are not American citizens and that immigration cases account for the largest single type of offense. Non-U.S. citizens committed 42.7% of all federal crimes in 2018, according to the independent agency created by Congress decades ago to reduce sentencing disparities and promote transparency and proportionality in sentencing. In its report the agency discloses that 54.3% of the 69,425 federal offenders last year were Hispanic. “Immigration cases accounted for the largest single group of offenses in fiscal year 2018, comprising 34.4% of all reported cases,” the commission writes in its annual report to Congress. “Cases involving drugs, firearms, and fraud were the next most common types of offenses after immigration cases. Together these four types of offenses accounted for 82.9 percent of all cases reported to the commission in fiscal year 2018.”

The second largest offense category, drugs, accounted for 28.1% of federal crimes last year and most cases involved methamphetamine. Judicial Watch has reported for years on the enormous amounts of meth that enter the U.S. through Mexico. A few years ago the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported a startling 300% increase in meth seizures coming from Mexico in one border state alone. The Sentencing Commission found that in 2018 Hispanics committed 9,020 federal drug trafficking crimes, nearly twice as many as those perpetrated by blacks (4,670) and more than double the drug trafficking offenses carried out by whites (4,499). Hispanics were also charged with more drug possession crimes (389) last year than any other group. Not surprisingly, Hispanics also committed the overwhelming amount of immigration related crimes, according to the federal statistics made public in May. Of the 23,656 immigration offenses recorded last year, Hispanics accounted for 22,782. They also committed the most money laundering crimes (504) compared to whites (444) and blacks (236), the Sentencing Commission document shows. Unlike the arrest records provided this month by the DOJ, the commission figures only include convicts that actually got sentenced.