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.

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