
64% of all federal arrests last year were of non-U.S. citizens - RickJWagner
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdwv/pr/statement-united-states-attorney-mike-stuart-bureau-justice-statistics-report-1
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tvchurch
Here's Alex Nowrasteh on this topic:
[https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1164862732102963200](https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1164862732102963200)

1.4% of all arrests in 2014 were federal.

Most law enforcement is by local or state governments.

This headline makes it seem like 64% of all arrests were for non-citizens. Not
at all the case.

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pyzon
This includes a huge number of arrests for crossing the border.

If you ignore immigration crimes, non-U.S. citizens are less likely to commit
crimes than U.S. citizens.

Without context, this is a textbook case of lying with statistics.

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pduff3
Why would you ignore a subset of crimes?

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evancox100
If you just read the headline, you think "gee, immigrants sure are committing
a lot of crimes here", when actually the increase is due to prosecuting the
act of them coming here in the first place. That doesn't completely negate the
point vis a vis use of law enforcement resources, but it's very different from
"immigrants are stealing, raping, and murdering everyone."

~~~
masonic

      prosecuting the act of them coming here in the first place. 
    

That's false. Only _re-entry after deportation_ counts as a crime in these
statistics.

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zucker42
Here is the original source
[https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/icfjs9818.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/icfjs9818.pdf)

Note these statistics from the highlights.

> The five crime types for which non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be
> prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were illegal reentry (72% of
> prosecutions), drugs (13%), fraud (4.5%), alien smuggling (4%), and misuse
> of visas (2%)

> The five crime types for which U.S. citizens were most likely to be
> prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were drugs (38% of prosecutions),
> weapons (21%), fraud (12%), public order (12%), and alien smuggling (6%)

> Non-U.S. citizens, who make up 7% of the U.S. population (per the U.S.
> Census Bureau for 2017), accounted for 15% of all federal immigration crimes
> and 15% of prosecutions in U.S. district court for non-immigration crimes in
> 2018 (tables 7a and 13).

With regards to the last stat I recommend you look at Table 7a, because that
shows most of the discrepancy is drugs.

It's unfortunate that the press release makes it sound like increased
enforcement is what this report warrants. My opinion is the opposite. If we
are arresting people for solely immigration offenses, then maybe the way that
we should address the "significant drain of federal taxpayer funds to [used]
prosecute those that are not taxpayers" is by decreasing enforcement.

