Daniel Horowitz has reviewed ICE’s brand new comprehensive enforcement and removal operations report. ICE reported that it issued detainers on criminal aliens in fiscal year 2019 who were collectively charged with 2,500 murders. To put that in perspective, albeit via an imperfect comparison, Horowitz says that law enforcement agencies only arrested 9,049 individuals in total for homicide in 2018.

This source places the total number of murder arrests in 2018 at a slightly higher number — 11,970. Either way, it’s clear that illegal aliens make up a shockingly high percentage of those arrested for homicide.

Horowitz acknowledges that some of those for whom a detainer issued in fiscal year 2019 might have been legal immigrants who were convicted of murder a while ago. But “the bulk of them,” he adds are “front-end detainers on illegal aliens who have just recently been charged with murder.”

Horowitz also notes that most illegal immigrants live in sanctuary jurisdictions where law enforcement doesn’t cooperate with ICE. Thus, there are many crimes, including murders, committed by illegal aliens that don’t result in detainers. California, for example, is home to by far the most illegal immigrants of any state in America. Yet, ICE only apprehended a fraction of the number of criminals they caught in Texas.

Thus, but for sanctuary jurisdictions, illegal immigrants would make up an even larger percentage of homicide arrests in the U.S.

The bottom line is that an alarming percentage of murders in America are committed by people who are here illegally. These are murders that we could prevent in many cases if we effectively enforced our immigration laws, e.g., by beefing up ICE and stepping up expedited removals.

Unfortunately, Democrats (and some Republicans) are dead set against such measures and against effective immigration enforcement generally.