A Justice Department website article highlighting a study that found undocumented immigrants commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens has vanished from public view, sparking controversy and questions. The piece – published by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) on September 12, 2024 – reported that in Texas from 2012 to 2018, undocumented immigrants were arrested far less often than native-born citizens for violent, property, and drug offenses. Its sudden removal comes amid heated political rhetoric portraying undocumented people as criminals, raising concerns about the motives for scrubbing the data from the official record.
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The DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs site now displays a notice that pages are under review “in accordance with recent Executive Orders,” leaving the NIJ study inaccessible.
Despite the removal of the study, we were able to find the original publishing by using the “WayBackMachine” internet archive service. We were able to find the site archived on January 7, 2025.
Study Finds Lower Arrest Rates Among Undocumented Immigrants
The NIJ-backed study, led by University of Wisconsin researchers and funded by a DOJ grant, examined Texas Department of Public Safety arrest records from 2012 through 2018. Crucially, Texas is unique in that law enforcement records the immigration status of every person arrested – officers must send arrestees’ fingerprints to the Department of Homeland Security, which returns an immigration status that is logged in the state criminal record. This allowed the researchers to distinguish arrests of undocumented immigrants from those of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens, providing an unprecedented data set. (Most states do not track immigration status in arrests, making such comparisons difficult.)
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Key findings from the Texas data (2012–2018):
Violent crimes: U.S.-born citizens had an annual violent crime arrest rate of 213 per 100,000 people, compared to 96.2 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants – less than half the rate of natives.
Drug crimes: U.S.-born citizens’ arrest rate for drug offenses was 337.2 per 100,000, versus 135 per 100,000 for undocumented immigrants (about 40% of the native rate).
Property crimes: U.S.-born Texans were arrested for property offenses at 165.2 per 100,000, while the undocumented rate was just 38.5 per 100,000 – roughly one-quarter the rate of native-born citizens.
Researchers used arrests as a proxy for offending, acknowledging this measure isn’t perfect (it partly reflects law enforcement activity). Nonetheless, undocumented immigrants had the lowest overall offending rates in Texas for total felonies and violent felonies throughout the seven-year period. Native-born Americans had the highest arrest rates in nearly every crime category, with legal immigrants usually in between. Every specific offense studied – including homicide, assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, arson, and drug crimes – followed this pattern: undocumented immigrants consistently showed significantly lower arrest rates than their U.S.-born counterparts.
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For example, the average homicide arrest rate for undocumented immigrants was less than half that of U.S. citizens (about 1.9 vs 4.8 per 100,000). In drug crimes, undocumented people were under half as likely to be arrested as natives, and notably, the study found no evidence of a growing crime share by undocumented immigrants over time. In fact, the proportion of crimes committed by the undocumented decreased or remained stable from 2012 to 2018 in Texas. “There is no evidence that the prevalence of undocumented immigrant crime has grown for any category,” the researchers concluded.
Screenshot of the NIJ article as preserved on the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), titled “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate.” The DOJ-funded study found undocumented people had far lower arrest rates for felonies in Texas, across violent, property, drug, and traffic offenses.
To calculate crime rates, the authors divided arrests by each group’s population. For the undocumented population size (the denominator), they used estimates from the Center for Migration Studies, a respected source on undocumented population data. On the numerator side, Texas’s practice of recording immigration status for arrestees was key. “To our knowledge, Texas is the only state that requires the determination and documentation of immigration status as part of its standard criminal justice records,” the study noted. This allowed a level of precision unavailable elsewhere, enabling a true apples-to-apples comparison of offending rates among undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and citizens.
Overall, the NIJ article emphasized that the findings support a broader research consensus: immigrants (including those undocumented) tend to commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, not more. Prior academic studies over decades have reached similar conclusions. For instance, separate research by the Cato Institute using Texas conviction data found that over 2013–2022, illegal immigrants were 26% less likely than U.S.-born citizens to be convicted of homicide in Texas. Numerous other studies have likewise shown no “immigrant crime wave” – if anything, higher immigration has coincided with lower crime rates in many areas.
Clashing Narratives: Immigrant Crime Myths in Politics and Media
The NIJ’s data-driven conclusion contradicts the prevailing narrative pushed by some political leaders and media figures, who often claim that undocumented immigrants fuel higher crime. This narrative has been especially popular among immigration hardliners and was a cornerstone of former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric. In his 2015 campaign launch speech, for example, Trump infamously characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said. That blanket portrayal of undocumented people as dangerous criminals set the tone for years of political discourse and divsion.
Conservative media and some elected officials have regularly amplified individual cases of crimes by undocumented individuals to suggest a broader crime epidemic. In October 2024, Fox News published a timeline of “shocking, high-profile crimes” committed by people in the country illegally, arguing that the record migrant influx under the Biden-Harris administration had led to a “migrant crime wave.” The piece highlighted brutal incidents like murders and assaults committed by undocumented suspects and asserted that “illegal immigration has remained a top issue for voters” due to such crimes. Families of victims (“angel families”) have been spotlighted in congressional hearings and on cable news to drive home these anecdotes as evidence of a crisis. One House committee report in 2023, for instance, lambasted the Biden administration for allegedly failing to vet a 17-year-old MS-13 gang member who entered as an unaccompanied minor and later was charged with a gruesome murder. “This is a safety issue for everyone… Kayla wasn’t doing anything wrong, and she didn’t deserve to be murdered,” the victim’s mother testified, in a story seized upon as a symbol of purported policy lapses.
Republican governors and lawmakers have likewise painted undocumented migrants as a public safety menace. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a vocal critic of President Biden’s border policies, has repeatedly argued that lax federal enforcement is letting dangerous individuals into the country. “Since [Biden] took office, we have seen record high levels of illegal immigration, including dangerous criminals and terrorists who are a threat to the public safety of our state and our nation,” Abbott said in June 2024, as he launched a “Top 10 Most Wanted Criminal Illegal Immigrants” list in Texas. Abbott accused the President of “dismantling effective border policies” and claimed Texas must crack down to “keep our communities safe” from the criminals coming in. He even told Fox News that Biden “is letting in known criminals… Texas is the first state to have a statewide crackdown on these criminals”, touting his state’s efforts to arrest undocumented offenders.
Such statements feed a common public perception that undocumented immigration and crime go hand-in-hand. Yet they directly contradict the NIJ study’s data, which indicate undocumented immigrants are far less likely to be arrested for serious crimes than U.S. citizens. Immigration experts note that focusing on raw numbers of immigrant crimes – rather than crime rates – can be misleading. (Undocumented immigrants make up an estimated 1.7 million of Texas’s 29 million residents in recent years, so when adjusted for population, their offending rate was much lower.) “Crime rates are the best way to judge whether immigrants make the U.S. more dangerous,” writes Alex Nowrasteh of Cato, pointing out that from 1990 to 2010, as the immigrant share of the U.S. population doubled, violent crime rates plummeted.
Despite this evidence, the political narrative of an “immigrant crime wave” remains domnanent. Even officials within the federal government have highlighted crimes by undocumented individuals. Under the Biden administration, while top officials generally acknowledged that the majority of migrants are not criminals, they still emphasized a focus on removing “criminal non-citizens.” Biden’s DHS directed ICE to prioritize deporting those who pose a threat to public safety (e.g. convicted felons), implicitly highlighting the presence of some criminals among the undocumented. By 2024, Republican leaders accused Biden’s team of not doing enough citing ICE statistics that tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions were not being detained or removed, whereas the administration countered that it was targeting the “worst of the worst” rather than casting a wider net In short, the image of the criminal alien remained a focal point in policy debates, even as DOJ’s own funded research undercut the notion that undocumented people commit more crime.
Against this backdrop, we were shocked (but not really) to discover that the NIJ’s article detailing these findings had been quietly removed from the DOJ’s website in recent weeks. The page URL now leads to a generic message or a “page not found” error. A Google search for the article’s title returns a stub noting “No information is available for this page”, indicating it is no longer indexed – an unusual situation for a year-old DOJ publication. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captured the page as recently as January 2025, but by early March 2025 it had disappeared from NIJ’s live site.
The Justice Department did not announce the takedown or offer an official explanation at the time. Instead, a banner on the Office of Justice Programs website states that content is being reviewed “in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance”. This suggests a broad review of agency webpages following the change in administration. Indeed, President Trump took office again on January 20, 2025, and new administrations often freeze or audit existing content. The NIJ article appears to have been a casualty of that review.
Critics immediately suspected a political motive. The removal was first flagged by David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, who noted it on social media. “Sometime in the last week, the DOJ removed this from its website. Wonder why?” Bier wrote pointedly. His implication was clear: the data undermined the Trump White House’s narrative of immigrants as dangerous, coming at a time when the administration was ramping up hardline enforcement. In fact, just days earlier the White House had touted the number of “illegal immigrants removed” in Trump’s first weeks back in office, bragging that it was “getting illegal immigrant killers, rapists, and drug dealers off our streets. President Trump has portrayed his renewed deportation push as a public-safety campaign, often highlighting violent crimes by undocumented people to justify sweeps. The NIJ study’s conclusion that undocumented immigrants are generally less prone to crime directly challenges that justification.
Federal officials have not given a direct comment about why the NIJ page was taken down. The House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff quietly preserved the article by entering it into the Congressional Record in January, ensuring the findings remain accessible even after the DOJ scrubbed them. (That archived copy confirms the study’s key statistics: undocumented Texans were arrested at half the rate of natives for violent and drug crimes, and one-quarter the rate for property crimes.) Still, the scrubbing of a taxpayer-funded research summary raises transparency concerns. “When data is removed, it’s easier for officials to make claims that aren’t supported by evidence,” says a policy analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It gives the public one less point of reference to fact-check broad statements about immigrants and crime.”
Some experts note that this is not an isolated incident. Under the first Trump administration, the DOJ and DHS frequently spotlighted crimes by undocumented immigrants – for example, launching the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office – while studies or reports that didn’t fit the narrative sometimes received less fanfare. The timing of this removal, coming as the administration implements new immigration enforcement efforts, has led to speculation that it was intentionally pulled to avoid undercutting policy messaging. “The data was inconvenient,” says David Bier, who also testified to Congress that mass deportation could actually increase crime rates because it would target a population that is, statistically, more law-abiding. Removing undocumented immigrants en masse “would remove a population less likely to commit serious crimes, [thereby] increasing crime and victimization rates for the U.S. population,” Bier argued in December testimony. In other words, if undocumented residents (who have lower offending rates) are deported, the overall crime rate among those left behind (primarily U.S. citizens) could tick up – a counterintuitive point that further undermines the “immigrant crime wave” trope.
Politics, Policy, and the Impact of Removing Data
The disappearance of the NIJ article has prompted renewed debate about politics and data in the immigration policy arena. Immigration advocates worry that scrubbing such information signals a return to policy-by-perception, where anecdotal horror stories overshadow hard evidence. They argue that public safety strategies should be driven by factual trends, not fear. “Keeping this report under wraps doesn’t make communities safer – it just makes the public less informed,” a spokesperson for the American Immigration Council said, noting that decades of research have shown no correlation between higher immigration and higher crime. The NIJ study, in the Council’s view, was important because it used government data to address a fraught question with clarity – and burying those findings is a step backward.
On the other side, immigration restrictionists contend that any crime committed by someone who entered illegally is a preventable tragedy, and they focus on the absolute numbers of offenses. They point out that even if the rates are lower, the raw number of crimes by undocumented immigrants isn’t negligible and each crime has victims. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who served in DHS under Trump, has argued that “crime rates do not matter, only the raw number of crimes and the harm caused”. By this logic, highlighting a lower crime rate among undocumented immigrants could be seen as downplaying real incidents. Trump officials have echoed this sentiment in pushing for stricter enforcement and sweeping deportations, essentially taking the stance that no level of criminal activity by undocumented immigrants is acceptable even if proportionally they offend less. This philosophical divide of whether to judge immigrant crime by rates versus absolute numbers is at the heart of much immigration debate.
The NIJ study’s removal comes at a sensitive moment. The current administration is implementing aggressive measures like nationwide raids and expanded detention, justified by claims of protecting Americans from immigrant crime. By contrast, the data from Texas suggest that undocumented immigrants are, as a group, not driving up crime rates – if anything, native-born Americans offend at higher rates. This contradiction has significant policy implications: it challenges the premise that ramped-up immigration enforcement will dramatically improve public safety. If undocumented residents are generally more law-abiding, strategies such as indiscriminate mass deportation could yield diminishing returns in crime reduction. Law enforcement resources might be more effectively used focusing on individuals (regardless of immigration status) who do pose genuine threats. Social media pages have been flooded with ICE-raids happening on construction job sites and other labor intensive jobs, arresting those actually in the process of working – not in the process of committing henious crimes as being portrayed.
For now, the NIJ’s official webpage remains offline, but its findings have not been completely erased. Watchdog groups and some members of Congress are pressing DOJ to explain why the article was taken down. They argue that federal research funded by taxpayer dollars should not be censored or hidden due to political optics. The Justice Department has yet to respond to inquiries from media outlets about the removal. In the meantime, the report survives in archives and in the public record. Whether its evidence will figure into policy discussions is another matter, especially in an atmosphere where narratives often overshadow nuance.
In summary, the vanishing of this DOJ study highlights the tension between empirical data and political narrative. The study’s message – undocumented immigrants appear to offend at lower rates than native-born Americans – undercuts a key rationale behind hardline immigration crackdowns. Its removal, without public explanation, raises concerns about transparency and the politicization of facts. As immigration and public safety continue to be hot-button issues, the question remains: Will policies be shaped by evidence, or by prevailing political narratives? The fate of the NIJ report suggests that when data and politics collide, data sometimes loses – at least on the official website. But the numbers, once revealed, continue to tell their own story, whether or not the DOJ wants us to see it.
