Two Words

Can Americans tell the difference between fact and opinion anymore?

The next time some misinformed person makes an unsupported assertion such as “most immigrants are criminals,” try responding with these two words:

“Prove it.”

You don’t have to be mean about it. You could just say, “Oh, really? What’s your source for that information? Can you prove it?”

Multiple analyses have shown that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. born citizens (NOTE: I had included a link to a study from the National Institute of Justice, a part of the US Department of Justice, that came to this conclusion, but that link, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate, is now redirecting to NIJ’s home page. The link worked fine five or six days ago (around January 27) when I wrote the first draft of this blog. It doesn’t work now. Aha! Looks like our Saffron-faced Sociopath in Chief and his slippery sycophants are rewriting history again!)

Other studies show that immigrants commit fewer murders, and that an increase in immigrant population correlates with reduced crime rates.

When you tell the angry pouting white guy misinformed person about these studies, expect them to claim that the U.S. Department of Justice, the American Immigration Council, and even the libertarian Cato Institute, (which had a Koch brother on its original board), are biased.

OK, then, how about the Great State of Texas? Yup, right there at the epicenter of our Trumpian dystopia sits Texas, the state with the longest border with Mexico, which (unsurprisingly) is the one state that actually tracks immigration status of persons arrested within its borders.

Texas’s numbers show that immigrants, legal or undocumented, commit substantially fewer murders in Texas than do American born citizens.

I should note that The Center for Immigration Studies (which claims to be non-partisan) argues that those conclusions are flawed, because it takes a long time to identify many convicts as illegal immigrants. If someone here illegally is arrested in Texas but has never had prior contact with the Department of Homeland Security, they won’t show up in a check of the database that tracks encounters with undocumented people.

Texas identified 10,968 such people between 2011 and 2024 (some of whom were already incarcerated at the time they were identified as undocumented, if I read it right) who, collectively, were convicted of over 10,000 crimes. It’s unclear to me if these 10,968 people are included in the 319,000 undocumented people who were arrested in Texas during that time, or if I should add them to that total. Either way, it doesn’t change the percentage of total eventual convictions much. Correct me if you think I’m doing the math wrong.

I couldn’t find any side-by-side yearly comparison of arrest and conviction rates for illegal arrestees vs. citizens and legal immigrant arrestees in Texas’s in published data.

But what the Texas Department of Public Safety’s (TDPS’s) data does show is that out of 319,000 “criminal non-citizens” charged with 558,000 crimes over the 13.5 years from June 1, 2011 to December 31, 2024, Texas secured approximately 205,000 convictions (about 36%).

Of those convictions, 16,987 (out of 43,510 charges) were for “obstructing police,” and 107,972 (out of 311,351 charges) were for “all other offenses.” So (again if I did the math right), those two nebulous categories accounted for nearly 40% of the convictions obtained.

How little do you have to do, especially if you’re not white, to get tagged with “obstructing police,” when a cop is having a bad day?

I’m guessing the 107,972 “all other offenses” are those that don’t fit into the remaining 10 crime categories (weapons, sexual offense, sexual assault, robbery, theft, kidnapping, drugs, burglary, assault, and homicide) listed on the TDPS’s chart?

So exactly what are “all other offenses?” Is that the kitchen sink a pissed off cop fishes a petty crime out of when they unilaterally decide the accused is “a bad guy” and should go to jail–for oh, I don’t know–something?

Which brings me to the Laken Riley Act. The murder of Laken Riley, a 22 year-old nursing student, by an illegal immigrant, was a horrific tragedy, and one that both our criminal justice and our immigration system failed to prevent. The illegal immigrant convicted of killing Laken Riley had previously been picked up for shoplifting, but was released. The law is an effort to prevent such a thing happening again. It requires detention, and allows deportation, of persons who cannot provide “appropriate documentation” of legal status who are merely accused (not convicted) of a laundry list of crimes like theft, shoplifting, burglary, or any other crime that results in death or bodily injury.

It sounds like a good idea, until this deprivation of due process inevitably results in the indefinite detention or even deportation (with little legal recourse) of innocent persons, possibly including people who’ve been here legally for years, who were picked up for, oh, I don’t know– being brown?

Apparently, we’re so fed up about immigration, and our Saffron-skinned Sociopath-in-Chief is so committed to his image as tough on immigration, that we just don’t care about due process or a functional system of justice anymore.

We all know that the U.S. immigration system is broken. It takes far too long for people from other countries to enter the United States legally, make America their home, and achieve citizenship. Which drives people who desperately want and need to get here to resort to swimming across a river booby-trapped with razor wire, or to risk death by dehydration or heat stroke in the Arizona desert for a chance to live in this country.

And yes, some of the people who slip through illegally are violent criminals, or drug dealers, or sexual predators.

We spend three times as much on immigration detention as we do adjudication, and have a backlog of over three million cases of seeking legal immigration status, including refugee and asylum determinations.

So do we keep giving tax breaks to billionaires, or do we fix this damn problem in a humane and systematic way?

Instead of demanding access to the Treasury’s federal payments system (the one that, among many other disbursements, sends out Social Security payments), resulting in the de facto forced retirement of David Lebryk, a long-time civil servant, maybe one-time illegal immigrant Elon Musk could cough up a little of his 422 BILLION to help the immigration courts clear that backlog of cases. That would create some efficiency, right, Elon?

Not holding my breath, I remain,

your harboring-no-illusions-but-praying-for-a-more-compassionate-response-to-our-immigration-mess

Ridiculouswoman