No, 13,000 Migrant Murderers Are Not Running Loose
Over the past week, former President Donald Trump has been making a bold claim: “Over 13,000, the exact number’s 13,099, convicted illegal alien murderers are now on the loose,” he said during a campaign rally on October 1. A few days before that, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris’] three and a half year period as Border Czar.”
That number comes from a letter that Rep. Tony Gonzales (R–Texas) shared on X last week. The letter, which is from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), describes the noncitizens on the agency’s docket who have been convicted of or charged with crimes. There are currently 13,099 “non-detained” noncitizens on the docket who have been convicted of homicide, according to ICE.
Some, including Trump, have taken “non-detained” to mean “roaming free.” But this is false.
“When ICE uses the term ‘non-detained,’ they mean not currently detained by ICE,” noted Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, this week. “In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences.” After that, Nowrasteh continues, “the government transfers them onto ICE’s docket for removal from the United States.”
There is a “small number of non-detained migrants” who have been convicted of homicide but can’t be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn’t have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but “non-detained” people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” explained the Depart
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