The majority of those arrested for federal crimes are not American citizens, a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows, yet another sign that the southwest frontier of the United States is out of control.
The data published in Immigration, Citizenship, and the Federal Justice System, 1998-2018, reveal that immigrants are major federal crime problem. Arrests of non-citizens have increased massively through the two decades.
Mexicans outnumber Americans in the number of arrests, as Breitbart.com noted in the second of two stories on the report, while Central Americans are a growing presence in federal cases, the report shows. They increased more than 3,000 percent, with a massive surge from 2017 to 2018 when they began pouring across the border in unprecedented numbers.
Upshot: Illegal aliens and foreigners are consuming more and more federal criminal justice resources.
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The Numbers
According to the report, the number of federal arrests of Americans versus foreigners — non U.S. citizens — has reversed itself. In 1998, Americans constituted 63 percent of all arrests; last year, non-citizens were 64 percent of arrests.
As well, non-citizens are seven percent of the population but 15 percent of arrests and prosecutions for non-immigration crimes.
Relative to other federal judicial districts, arrests in the five on our southwest border nearly doubled in the 20 years from 33 percent to 65 percent. And from 2017 to 2018, the number of those arrested jumped from 76,171 to 126,293.
Arrests of non-citizens during the two decades jumped 234 percent; arrests of Americans rose 10 percent. In just one year, 2017-2018, federal arrests of non-citizens jumped 71 percent from 73,022 to 125,027.
As for prosecutions in 2018, 57 percent of those prosecuted in U.S. district courts were U.S. citizens and 43 percent weren’t.
Demographics
As for national origins, the data show, federal authorities collared more Mexicans than Americans in 2018, 78,062 versus 70,542, while the number of Central Americans 39,858. The number of Mexicans arrested increased by 46,674, or 175 percent, since 1998, while Central Americans increased 30-fold, from 1,171. That’s 3,300 percent.
The share of Mexicans arrested rose from 28 percent to 40 percent through the 20 years, the share of Central Americans went from 1 percent to 20 percent, while the share of Americans arrested from 63 percent to 36 percent.
Not surprisingly, arrests for immigration crimes rose significantly, from 20,942 in 1998 to 58,031 in 2017. With last year’s tsunami from Central America, the number nearly doubled to 108,667 in 2018.
In keeping with the surge of illegals from the Northern Triangle, their arrests along the border nearly tripled from 2017 to 2018, from 13,549 to 37,590.
That number isn’t likely to go down in 2019 and 2020 given the number of Central Americans that began pouring across the border in October, a steady flow that became a raging torrent in March when 103,732 illegals crossed. In May, the figure reached 144,266.
That more than doubled the number in October.
Through July, border agents apprehended 862,785 illegals.
The Crimes
The report also included data on the types of crimes committed. Twenty-five percent of all federal drug arrests occurred in the five federal judicial districts along the border.
In 2018, non-citizens were 24 percent of all drug arrests, 25 percent of property arrests, and 28 percent of fraud arrests.
The vast majority of arrests of non-citizens in 2018, 85 percent, were for immigration crimes.
Immigration prosecutions more than tripled through the two decades.
Just 0.3 percent of the non-citizens prosecuted in 2018 were first-time offenders for illegal entry. All other non-citizens were prosecuted for a different crime.
The two crimes for which non-citizens were prosecuted the most were illegal re-entry, 72 percent, and drugs, 13 percent. Fraud prosecutions were 4.5 percent, alien smuggling, 4 percent, and misuse of visas, 2 percent.
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