The Problem With Downplaying Immigrant Crime

by David Frum

Why has the Donald Trump candidacy—which so many professionals and pundits at first dismissed as a joke—flared this summer? In the first week of July, 15 percent of Republicans supported Trump for president in a YouGov poll. By the third week, that support had almost doubled, to 28 percent—with another 10 percent listing him as their second choice.

Something happened in July to send Trump’s numbers soaring. That something may have been the murder of Kathryn Steinle.

On July 5, the 32-year-old Steinle posed with her father for a photograph on a San Francisco pier at 6:30 on a Wednesday evening. Suddenly there was a pop. Steinle crumpled. She died in hospital two hours later.

The stunningly random killing left behind a devastated family—and a confessed killer: Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been convicted of seven previous felonies and five times been ordered deported from the United States.

In 2009, Lopez crossed the border into the United States again, was caught, and was sentenced to four years in federal prison. After his federal sentence was served, Lopez-Sanchez was handed over to San Francisco authorities to face trial for a local drug charge. The local court dismissed the charge and ordered the Lopez-Sanchez released into the community. Nobody notified federal immigration authorities, because San Francisco law forbids such cooperation.

...In 2011, the Government Accountability Office delivered a major report on criminal activity by unauthorized immigrants. The GAO was able to locate the arrest and sentencing records of roughly half the immigrants in local jails and state and federal prisons, and then sampled them to estimate what they contained. Here’s what it found:

• An estimated 25,000 of these undocumented immigrants serving sentences for homicide
• A cumulative total of 2.89 million offenses committed by these undocumented immigrants between 2003 and 2009 (although half a million of these were for immigration-related offenses)
• Among those offenses: An estimated 42,000 robberies, 70,000 sex crimes, 81,000 auto thefts, 95,000 weapons offenses, and 213,000 assaults

Second, crime by the unauthorized, like the population of illegal immigrants itself, appears to be disproportionately concentrated in border states.  A Texas Department of Public Safety report obtained by the PJMedia estimated that the illegal immigrants in Texas prisons had committed a total of 2,993 homicides in a state that typically suffers between 1100 and 1400 homicides per year. After years of welcome decline, crime rates are rising in immigration hubs including Houston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and San Diego.

 

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