Democrats, from Vice President Kamala Harris to legacy media figures, are gaslighting voters in the run-up to the November election about the level of crime committed by illegal immigrants. The crimes are real, but Democrats and “news” organizations doing on-air pro bono work for the blue party won’t admit it because that would draw proper attention to the security disaster of the Biden-Harris policy of throwing the border open.
Like many network television reporters, Martha Raddatz thinks she is pretty clever. Hosting ABC’s premier Sunday show, This Week, she played a clip of former President Donald Trump saying that immigrants were engaging “in open gun battles with rival groups” that are destroying the “once peaceful, beautiful, pretty, crime-free community” of Aurora, Colorado.
She then pressed her guest, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), to justify Trump’s claim after noting that the “Republican mayor” of Aurora had called Trump’s description of his city “grossly exaggerated.”
“Well, Martha, you just said the mayor said they were exaggerated,” Vance began. “That means there’s got to be some element of truth here. And, of course, President Trump was actually in Aurora, Colorado, talking to people on the ground, and what we’re hearing, of course, Martha, is that people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.”
Raddatz interrupted Vance: “Sen. Vance, I’m going to stop you because I know exactly what happened. I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes, and the mayor said our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns. A handful of problems.”
To which Vance shot back, “Martha, do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris’s open border?”
“Americans are so fed up with what’s going on, and they have every right to be,” Vance continued. “And I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs.”
If Trump and Vance prevail over Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), in the election, it will be because of exchanges like this one. Democrats and their media allies have discounted the existence of crime committed by illegal immigrants for so long, and they had so effectively shut down dissent on the topic, that when pressed with the reality of what is occurring in communities across the country, they trip into saying ridiculous things that amount to, “Migrant crime is OK because only a few apartment complexes have been overtaken by illegal immigrant gangs.”
A difficult subject to measure
Considering all the controversy surrounding crime in general, such as whether it is up or down and whether we should believe the FBI’s numbers, it isn’t surprising that data related to illegal immigrant crime are hard to come by. No one can say definitively how many illegal immigrants are in the country, let alone how much crime they are committing.
It is safe to say that legal immigrants commit crimes less often than native-born Americans. But considering that legal immigrants are a highly self-selected group and that many of them have to be highly skilled or have a job lined up before they can come here, this shouldn’t be surprising.
But illegal immigrants are a different subject entirely from legal immigrants. They are people who, by definition, are already guilty of committing a crime, either by crossing the border without proper authorization or entering on a valid visa and then illegally overstaying it once it has expired. Those who illegally crossed the southern border are probably the more likely to act criminally because legal immigrants who obtained a visa to enter the U.S. are likely to have had a special skill, job, or education that makes them less likely to turn to crime.
Illegal border crossers are a different story. They have often traveled thousands of miles across difficult terrain, made more dangerous by the fact the territory is controlled by violent and ruthless gangs. People don’t survive that journey without developing a flexible view of which laws are to be followed and which are to be ignored.
Digging into what little data we have, most studies on illegal immigrant crime come out of Texas because Texas is one of the few jurisdictions that records an arrested suspect’s immigration status when he or she is taken into custody. This is why whenever one sees a study claiming to show that illegal immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans, it is always based on Texas Department of Public Safety data.
The two most common studies cited by media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN on illegal immigrant crime were conducted by the libertarian Cato Institute, which believes in open borders, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both found that judging by the number of those identified as illegal immigrants when first arrested by Texas law enforcement agencies, compared to those arrested who are native-born, the native-born population is more likely to commit crimes than the illegal immigrant population.
But as Jason Richwine of the Center for Immigration Studies has noted, and which has been confirmed by the Texas Department of Public Safety, DPS uses four, not two, immigration status categories: 1) legal immigrants, 2) illegal immigrants, 3) prison-identified illegal immigrants, and 4) unknown and other. Crucially, Cato and PNAS only used the first two statuses when crunching their numbers.
When Richwine worked with DPS to get a fuller picture of the immigration status of those arrested by using all four immigration classifications, he found a lot more illegal immigrants had committed crimes than Cato and PNAS reported. In fact, Richwine found that illegal immigrants were more likely to be convicted of homicide and sexual assault than native-born Americans.
One illegal immigrant crime is one too many
Leaving the debate about whether illegal immigrants are more or less likely to commit crime aside for a moment, the larger matter, as highlighted by Vance’s exchange with Raddatz, is that no amount of illegal immigrant crime is acceptable.
Are there violent drug gangs made up of native-born Americans that occasionally take over entire apartment buildings in the U.S.? Yes. Does that mean we should simply tolerate it when violent foreign gangs do the same thing? Absolutely not!
As shocking as it may seem to Raddatz, who lives in a multimillion-dollar house in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua did take over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado. The gang members have done so in other cities as well. This has been confirmed by none other than the prestigious law firm Perkins Coie.
Perkins Coie was not hired by Democrats, Republicans, or even ABC News to determine the truth about what happened in Aurora but by the bank that lent money to the company that ran the apartment building in question. The company had defaulted on a loan to the bank, and Perkins Coie was hired as part of the bankruptcy proceedings to see if the loan failed because of negligent management or if there was a crime involved. Perkins Coie found illegal immigrant crime.
“The evidence we have reviewed indicates that gang members are engaging in flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion, and other criminal activities, often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations,” the law firm’s report concluded.
None of this is happening in Raddatz’s neighborhood, though, so we are to conclude that it is fine and dandy.
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However, for millions of people less privileged than Raddatz, their communities have been turned into violent border towns thanks to the catch-and-release policies of the Biden-Harris administration. Pressed by Fox News anchor Brett Baier to identify how many migrants she has released into the country, Harris refused to answer. The Biden Department of Homeland Security won’t say, either. The best estimates place the number at around 4 million, a larger population than 23 states.
Are all illegal immigrants, most of whom only came here to find work, criminals? No, of course not. But many of them are. And every time one of them kills someone or rapes a woman or crashes his car while driving without a license, that is a calamity that could have been prevented if the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t dismantled Trump’s successful border security policies.