The total number of federal arrests of Mexican nationals living in the United States now exceeds the total number of federal arrests of American citizens, federal data reveals.

A new report by the Department of Justice (DOJ) finds that in 2018, the number of Mexican nationals arrested for federal crimes exceeded the number of American citizens who were arrested for federal crimes by about 8,000 arrests.

For example, more than 78,000 federal arrests of Mexicans were made last year. Compare that to the roughly 70,500 federal arrests made of American citizens the same year. Over 20 years, the number of federal arrests made of Mexican nationals in the U.S. has soared by 175 percent while federal arrests of Americans grew by only 10 percent.

Likewise, the number of federal arrests of non-U.S. citizens is nearly double the arrests of Americans. In 2018, law enforcement officials arrested more than 125,000 non-U.S. citizens for federal crimes — a 234 percent increase since 1998.

Central Americans in the U.S. have had the largest increase in federal arrests over the last two decades. In 1998, only about 1,200 Central Americans were arrested for federal crimes. Fast-forward to 2018, when nearly 40,000 Central Americans were arrested for federal crimes. This indicates an increase in federal arrests of more than 3,300 percent over the last 20 years.

DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More than Tripled in Last 20 Yearshttps://t.co/HktBjrtqlz — John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) August 22, 2019

As Breitbart News reported, though non-U.S. citizens represent just seven percent of the total U.S. population, they accounted for 15 percent of all federal arrests and 15 percent of all prosecutions for non-immigration related crimes in 2018. This indicates that non-U.S. citizens were about 2.3 times as likely to be arrested or prosecuted for non-immigration related crimes.

For non-immigration offenses, the total of federal arrests for non-U.S. citizens between 1998 and 2018 increased nearly eight percent, and between 2017 and 2018 rose almost ten percent.

Non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted for illegal re-entry, that is illegal aliens who have been previously deported, drugs, fraud, alien smuggling, and misuse of visas.

A 2018 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report discovered nearly all illegal and legal immigrants in U.S. federal prisons are from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Guatemala.

Between 2010 and 2015, the average annual cost to incarcerate criminal illegal and legal immigrants slightly decreased — as the criminal alien population slightly decreased as well — from $1.56 billion to about $1.42 billion. That cost is paid for by American taxpayers who are forced to offset the costs of mass immigration to the country.

Every year, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the overwhelming majority arriving through the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized are able to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country. Between 2005 and 2017, chain migration, alone, brought nearly 10 million foreign nationals to the U.S.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.