Trump’s Immigration Policies Made America Less Safe. Here’s the Data.

But new data reveal that Trump was the one whose immigration policies damaged the country’s security. In fact, he released more convicted criminals into the United States than his successor.

This is not to lend credence to Trump’s efforts to demonize immigrants as dangerous or violent. Data from the Census Bureau shows that immigrants — both legal and illegal — are at least half as likely as citizens to be incarcerated for crimes committed in the United States. (This is why deporting everyone living here illegally would increase crime rates.)

But when it comes to the small percentage of noncitizens who do commit crimes, Trump did not prioritize removing them during his term in office. In fact, he explicitly deprioritized them.

In his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order rescinding Obama-era orders that directed the Department of Homeland Security to focus its resources on detaining and removing noncitizens who committed serious crimes. Trump said he would not “exempt classes or categories of removable aliens.” His goal, he said, was enforcement “against all removable aliens.”

What did that mean in practice? Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were no longer required to focus on felons. They could arrest anyone caught here illegally, and they did — from pizza delivery drivers to domestic-violence victims to spouses of U.S. citizens with no criminal records.

New government data obtained by the Cato Institute highlight what happened next: Immigrants with serious criminal records were frequently released into the country instead of being detained for deportation. This included individuals who were transferred to the custody of ICE after serving their sentences and those who were previously deported and encountered ICE after crossing into the country again.

From January 2017 to February 2020, the Trump administration released more than 58,000 convicted criminals into the United States, including more than 8,600 violent criminals and 306 murderers. Contrast that with the Biden administration, which reinstated enforcement priorities: Overall, the average month under Trump saw twice as many releases as under Biden.

Admittedly, it is always difficult to carry out deportations to certain countries, and given that immigration enforcement has limited resources, some of these releases might be inevitable. Nevertheless, how the Trump administration prioritized its enforcement targets speaks volumes.

In fact, it booked far more noncriminals into ICE custody than the criminals it was releasing — effectively replacing the criminals in its detention facilities with people with no criminal charges or convictions. For instance, in May 2018, ICE released more than 3,000 individuals with criminal convictions or charges pending while booking more than 19,000 without any record.

Recall that in May 2018, the Trump administration was in the process of a massive family separation operation, taking children away from migrant parents who were detained by Border Patrol. The Justice Department’s inspector general reported that for the assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Texas, the policy “had a considerable effect on his office’s resources and affected their ability to prosecute other substantive crimes.” The inspector general also concluded that sex offenders weren’t being prosecuted because resources were going to family separation.

Then, when the pandemic hit, the Trump White House forced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue an order under Title 42 of the U.S. health code that mandated the immediate expulsion of illegal crossers, in an attempt to block people from seeking asylum. But that order also eliminated any criminal penalties for crossing, meaning that any deported criminals who tried reentering and were caught weren’t detained or sent to prison; they were merely returned to Mexico within hours to try again and again.

The result: Arrests of convicted criminals trying to enter the United States illegally jumped threefold. Many were able to evade Border Patrol, and some went on to commit violent acts in the United States.

When Biden tried to rescind Title 42, Republican states convinced the courts to keep it in place for another year, during which evasions continued at a high rate. After it was canceled, evasions of Border Patrol fell 70 percent. Canceling Title 42 was perhaps the single-most consequential immigration policy of Biden’s presidency, delivering far more security than anything Trump did in four years.

The media have simply accepted that Trump immigration policies were good for security. Fox News’s Bret Baier pressed Kamala Harris to apologize to individuals tragically victimized by a few noncitizens released in the past four years. Why hasn’t the same been asked of Trump when those tragedies occurred during his term? Why has no one asked him to justify ICE using 68 percent of its detention space in 2019 to hold immigrants without criminal convictions?

Think about these questions the next time Trump calls for “mass deportation.” We already know what that means: Once again, the government would no longer prioritize targeting offenders. Once again, it would try to clear out a population that is less likely to commit serious crimes. And once again, Americans would be less safe.