Fact check: To attack Harris, Trump falsely describes new stats on immigrants and homicide

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” Trump wrote in another Friday post. They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote, escalating his rhetoric, on Saturday.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

The new statistics, released by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, said there were 425,431 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions.

The statistics have been deployed by Trump and various Republican lawmakers and right-wing commentators as alarming evidence of Harris’ supposed mismanagement of immigration policy. But in addition to exaggerating her role on the file — she was never actually “border czar” — much of the chatter has inaccurately described what the statistics show.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

It’s not clear how many of the 13,099 people with homicide convictions on ICE’s non-detained docket as of July 21 are currently incarcerated in jails and prisons. Regardless, John Sandweg, an attorney who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said in a Saturday interview that it is “100% false” to say all the homicide offenders on the non-detained docket entered the US during Harris’ vice presidency. Sandweg added: “These are individuals who undoubtedly entered the United States over a long period of time. … A lot of them have probably been on the list for 20 years, where the US has just been unable to deport.”

CNN could not immediately find public statistics on how many people with criminal convictions were on the non-detained docket during Trump’s presidency. But there are public statistics from just before and just after his presidency — and those statistics, which we’ll discuss later in this article, make clear that Trump, too, presided over a non-detained docket that included hundreds of thousands of people with criminal convictions.

A Supreme Court decision requires ICE to release some offenders

Trump’s posts left open the impression that the homicide offenders on the non-detained docket had foreign homicide convictions but were nonetheless allowed to cross the US border and live freely in this country. In reality, public data makes it clear that the overwhelming majority of people with criminal convictions on the non-detained docket were convicted in the US, as Sandweg and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which supports immigration, both told CNN.

Why aren’t these people in immigration detention if they have been convicted of a crime as serious as homicide? Under a 2001 Supreme Court decision, the US government is not allowed to indefinitely keep someone in immigration detention after they have been ordered removed from the country. So if someone has served their criminal sentence for homicide and then is ordered to be removed from the US, but their country is uncooperative with the US on immigration and won’t take them back, they must be released in the US — usually after no more than six months in immigration detention.

“Let’s say you have a Russian who was convicted of homicide. There’s nothing we can do there,” Sandweg said, given how Russia simply won’t accept the deportation. “There comes a point where you just have to release them.” He added that this doesn’t mean the person is “completely free” — people on the non-detained docket often have to check in with ICE or be monitored electronically — “but there’s just no more legal authority to continue the detention.”

Sandweg added: “ICE, of course, is not willy-nilly saying, ‘Okay, people convicted of murder, you’re not a priority.’ … We have a guy convicted of homicide, our strong preference is not to release them onto the streets.”

Reichlin-Melnick, who noted Saturday on social media that the non-detained docket includes people in jails and prisons, wrote on social media on Friday that “anyone on ICE’s non-detained docket with a homicide conviction has likely been in the country for decades, served a full criminal sentence, and can’t be removed because they’re from a country which restricts US deportations.”

Reichlin-Melnick continued: “There are others on ICE’s non-detained docket who have serious criminal records who, after serving their time, managed to win some form of protection and relief from removal. They are now here legally, but remain on the docket and are required to check in with ICE periodically.”

The list of convicted criminals on the non-detained docket includes both people who crossed the border illegally and people who came to the US legally, such as with a visa or green card, and then committed a crime and were placed in removal proceedings or were given a removal order.

What the numbers show

The non-detained docket is not a new creation of the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, there were hundreds of thousands of people with criminal convictions on the non-detained docket during the Trump presidency, too.

A reporter for Fox News, the right-wing outlet whose reporting on these statistics Trump repeatedly promoted on Friday, noted Friday evening on social media that “not all of these criminals entered during the Biden admin, as some are claiming” and that “some of these criminals go back many years across multiple administrations.”

A previous official federal report said there were 368,574 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of August 2016, under the Obama administration, about five months before Trump became president. And another federal document said there were 405,786 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of early June 2021, less than five months into the Biden-Harris administration. Again, the July 2024 number was 425,431 total convicted criminals.

In other words, the list grew about 10% between August 2016 and June 2021 — a roughly five-year period that included the four-year Trump administration — and then grew about another roughly 5% in the three-plus years under the Biden-Harris administration between June 2021 and July 2024.

Because official information on people on the non-detained docket with criminal convictions has only been released sporadically, with dates that don’t line up with the start and end dates of presidential administrations, it’s not possible to say how much of the increase happened under the Trump administration versus how much happened during the final months of the Obama administration and the first months of the Biden-Harris administration.

Regardless, there’s no basis for saying, as Trump kept doing Friday, that all of the people on the docket with homicide convictions came in during the Biden-Harris administration — and the numbers show “the docket certainly grew under the Trump administration,” Sandweg said. (He added that, to be fair, Trump faced the same stubborn issues with uncooperative foreign countries as other presidents.)

The crimes committed by people on the non-detained docket in July 2024 ranged from the most serious offenses, like homicide and sexual assault, to “gambling,” “liquor,” and “obscenity” offenses. The conviction categories with the highest number of people on the non-detained docket were “traffic offenses” (77,074), “assault” (62,231), “dangerous drugs” (56,533) and “immigration” (51,933).

CNN could not immediately find public data on the number of people with homicide convictions specifically who were on the non-detained docket in past years, including during the Trump administration.

It is clear that the total number of people on the non-detained docket, including people without any criminal conviction, has spiked during the Biden-Harris administration. (There are numerous reasons that people can end up on the docket; we won’t get into those here.) ICE says the docket jumped from roughly 3.3 million in the 2020 fiscal year, the last full fiscal year under Trump, to roughly 6.2 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

Harris critics are entitled to cite this real increase. Her presidential opponent, though, is criticizing her dishonestly.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this article.

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