In a recent essay, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s immigration expert bemoaned a lack of data concerning “immigrant criminality.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) can help her out.

The agency’s latest report shows 245,000 criminal aliens were booked into Texas jails from 2011 through February 2018.

The aliens, two-thirds of whom were in the country illegally, were charged with more than 650,000 criminal offenses. They have been convicted of almost 600 murders, 30,000 assaults, 3,300 sexual assaults, 9,000 burglaries, 20,000 thefts, 38,000 drug crimes and 274 kidnappings.

These are conservative figures because they included only alien arrests reported to DPS by Texas police agencies. Additionally, arrestees not “biometrically verified” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were excluded from the data set.

Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center expert, apparently missed or ignored these Texas-sized statistics. Her pedigree as an immigration attorney and former director of border policy at the open-borders U.S. Chamber of Commerce may explain her myopia.

But facts are facts. The scale and frequency of serious crimes committed by illegal aliens in Texas are genuinely alarming.

Immigration enthusiasts, conflating legal and illegal immigrants, broadly claim that “immigrants” commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans. The DPS numbers show that legal immigrants do tend to be more law-abiding.

Not so for illegals.

Take murder, for example. While constituting an estimated 6.4 percent of Texas’s population, illegal aliens accounted for 5.4 percent of state homicide convictions. Sexual assault convictions were also on par with native-born residents. Kidnapping, gambling, smuggling and vagrancy numbers were much higher for illegals than for U.S. citizens.

These crimes – along with the human toll and expense involved in arrests, trials, “free” legal aid and incarceration – were 100 percent due to the presence of illegal aliens in Texas.

Ms. Brown says she wants to know the extent of criminal activity by illegal aliens nationally (don’t we all?) and she awaits the day when government agencies report data transparently and comprehensively. Such statistics – properly disaggregated for legal immigrants and illegal aliens – can then be compared with native-born offenders.

Even in Texas, where sanctuary-style policies persist in cities and on college campuses in defiance of the state’s anti-sanctuary law (Senate Bill 4), the full extent of immigrant crime is not fully known.

If Ms. Brown truly wants to calibrate criminal acts by migrants, she can start by taking off the “bipartisan” blinders and taking a hard look at Texas. She should be appalled.