The truth about "migrant crime" during the Trump administration

"Our crime rate is going up while crime statistics all over the world are plunging," Trump told the crowd at the Turning Point Action Conference last week in West Palm Beach, Florida. "We have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime."

This is one of the central arguments of the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump and his Republican allies claim that, during the Biden administration, undocumented immigrants have fueled a crime wave. As Trump tells it, Venezuela and other countries are emptying their prisons and sending their worst criminals to the United States. 

None of these claims stands up to scrutiny. The crime rate in the United States is not "going up" — it is sharply declining. Violent crime has declined or remained flat every year of the Biden administration. The last time violent crime increased on an annual basis was 2020, when homicides spiked during the last year of Trump's presidency. 

Moreover, there is no evidence of an increase in "migrant crime." Crime analyst Jeff Asher looked at 2023 data in the 14 Texas counties that share a border with Mexico. If undocumented immigrants were fueling a crime wave, one would expect it to be concentrated in these border counties. Asher found that the "14 counties along the Texas-Mexico border have seen a relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole." Zooming out to the full three years of the Biden administration, Asher found the same trend. 

This should not be surprising. Studies show that undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. 

These facts have not stopped the Republican Party from blaming individual criminal acts by undocumented immigrants on the Biden administration. When a six-year-old girl was tragically hit by an undocumented drunk driver and left with serious injuries, the Republican Party saw it as an opportunity to score political points. 

"THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN — AND WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED UNDER TRUMP," the RNC posted on X.

But it is not necessary to speculate. Trump was president for four years. Although undocumented immigrants are less likely than citizens to commit crimes, some crimes are committed by undocumented immigrants. The four years Trump was president were no exception. A review of media reports during the first Trump administration reveals that crime by undocumented immigrants did not start when Trump left office.

The only difference is, when an undocumented immigrant committed a crime during the Trump administration, Trump blamed Democrats. 

When an Iowa college student, Molly Tibbetts, was murdered by an undocumented immigrant in the summer of 2018, Trump said Democrats were responsible. "Democrat immigration policies are destroying innocent lives and spilling very innocent blood," Trump said in August 2018, more than 18 months into his presidency. "We believe that any party that puts criminal aliens before American citizens should be voted out of office." In a 2018 ad for his unsuccessful reelection campaign, Trump said that Democrats are "complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants."

What has changed is not the existence of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants — or the volume of those crimes — but how those crimes are framed by Trump and his right-wing allies. During the Trump administration, Trump claimed that crimes by undocumented immigrants were the result of Democratic policies that were out of his control. Now, Trump and the Republican Party are still blaming Democrats but claiming that, if Trump wins another term, these crimes will end completely.

The politics of anecdotes

In Trump's stump speech, which he recently retooled to focus on Vice President Harris, Trump claims that "[u]nder Border Czar Harris, our communities are being ravaged by migrant crime." (Harris was not named the "Border Czar" but was tasked with addressing the root causes of migration from South and Central America to the U.S. border.) Trump then lists a series of anecdotes about crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants: the rape of a child in Massachusetts, the assault of another child in New York, the murder of a child in Texas. 

All of these crimes are tragedies with real victims. The emotional power of these stories allows them to be effectively exploited by Trump. But they are not proof of a larger trend. And a review of news reports reveals that the same sorts of crimes also occurred with regularity during the Trump administration.

In order to compare media coverage of “migrant crime” during the Trump and Biden administrations, Popular Information searched an extensive U.S. news database for articles that mention "murder," "rape," "shooting," or "assault" within close proximity to the word "immigrant." We then compared the results of this search for July 2018, a month during the Trump administration, with July 2022, a month during the Biden administration.

Not all crimes are reported in the media. But the results showed that instances of crime by undocumented immigrants received regular coverage in both administrations. The search uncovered seven instances of alleged "migrant crime" during July 2018 and three instances of "migrant crime" during July 2022. 

One high-profile July 2022 case involved the alleged rape of a child girl by an undocumented Guatamalan immigrant who had been in the United States for several years. In a July 2018 case, an undocumented Mexican national was arrested in Johnson County, Kansas on charges of raping a child. There were several other news stories in July 2018 about sexual assaults committed by undocumented immigrants in Ohio, Alabama, and California. 

Popular Information repeated the same search for January 2018 and January 2022. Both months featured fewer reported "migrant crimes," which is consistent with studies showing that violent crimes such as rape and aggravated assault occur more frequently in summer. Still, under Trump and Biden, there were some winter reports of “migrant crime.”

In January 2018, media outlets published articles about a undocumented man threatening to shoot and kill other passengers on a Greyhound bus and two instances of rape charges brought against men in Indiana and Florida. In January 2022, the search returned one report of an undocumented immigrant shooting and killing a Harris County, Texas sheriff during a traffic stop.

Nevertheless, Trump is already featuring anecdotes of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants during the Biden administration in his television ads attacking Harris. Over the next three months, despite the existence of similar anecdotes during the Trump administration, ads like this are likely to blanket the airwaves.

But these anecdotes, while tragic, do not reveal anything about Harris, the crime rate in the United States, or the efficacy of immigration policy during the Biden administration.