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  • 2019-01-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Were 17,000 Criminal Aliens and 6,000 MS-13 Gang Members Arrested in 2018? (en)
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  • In the run-up to an 8 January 2019 primetime address by President Trump on border security and the government shutdown, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released a set of seven facts on a page titled borderfacts.com. This article addresses their third claim, which states (in full): In 2018, over 17,000 adults arrested at the border had prior criminal records. This included over 6,000 gang members, a major number of those members were from MS-13. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) considers someone as having a criminal record if that person has been convicted of crime, whether in the United States or abroad, so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States. Broadly speaking, the over 17,000 adults arrested at the border had prior criminal records claim holds up, but context is important. Of the 17,000 adults referenced here, 63 percent were not attempting to cross the southern border on land between ports of entry, and therefore their inclusion in a wall fact post is misleading, as explained by Public Radio International (PRI): Those encountered individuals would have been immediately deported, thanks to fingerprinting efforts at ports of entry. In terms of individuals encountered crossing the U.S.-Mexico border where a wall might one day exist, only 6,259 individuals with criminal records were encountered by agents in between ports of entry in 2018, according to U.S. Border Patrol statistics. Those 6,259 or so individuals represent just 1.7% of the 361,993 total number of people encountered by U.S Border Patrol between ports of entry in 2018. Furthermore, nearly 50% of the crimes related to this list of criminal alien encounters involved individuals whose criminal status stemmed from past failed attempts to cross the border: While the number of criminal alien arrests is reasonably documented, the actual number of violent criminals encountered crossing between ports of entry is a remarkably small fraction of the overall population of people encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The most questionable aspect of this RNC fact is the suggestion that the nearly 6,000 gang members deported in 2018 included a major number of people belonging to the violent gang MS-13. We don’t know what the RNC means by the term major number, but what we do know is that Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), a different agency than the U.S. Border Patrol, deported 5,872 gang members in fiscal year 2018. Those individuals were not caught crossing the border, nor is it certain they got to the U.S. by crossing the southern border initially. Instead, they were caught up in ICE enforcement activities in 2018: ICE data does not provide any breakdown of gang membership, and therefore the assertion that a major number of the deported persons were MS-13 appears to rest on several claims made by President Trump, as reviewed by the Washington Post: Using a range of data from ICE, the Department of Justice, and the Government of Guatemala from the previous fiscal year (2017), the Washington Post concluded that Trump’s claim of thousands of MS-13 members captured under his watch was highly overblown: All told, the statistics provided by CBP, ICE, and others indicate that criminal aliens have been caught crossing the southern border, but they are a small subset of a much larger population of individuals caught crossing the border. The deportation of gang members is a separate issue in terms of border protection, as these people are typically not caught in the act of crossing the border. It is factual to say that nearly 6,000 gang members were deported by ICE in 2018, but unreasonable to assume that a major number of them (an inherently vague term in the first place) belonged to the gang MS-13. (en)
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