DOJ: Federal Arrests of Foreigners More than Tripled in Last 20 Years

The number of federal arrests of foreign nationals, that is non-United States citizens living in the country, has more than tripled over the last two decades, new Department of Justice (DOJ) data reveals.

A report by DOJ finds that while federal arrests of U.S. citizens rose just ten percent between 1998 and 2018, federal arrests of non-U.S. citizens rose about 234 percent over the same period.

For example, in 1998, 63 percent of all federal arrests were of U.S. citizens, while non-U.S. citizens accounted for about 37 percent of all federal arrests. In 2018, about 64 percent of all federal arrests were of non-U.S. citizens — accounting for 24 percent of all federal drug arrests, 25 percent of all federal property arrests, and 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests.

U.S. citizens, on the other hand, make up a small minority of federal arrests today, accounting for only 36 percent of all federal arrests in 2018. The data is not broken down on how many of these U.S. citizens are naturalized citizens, foreign-born, and how many are native-born U.S. citizens.

Though non-U.S. citizens represent just seven percent of the total U.S. population, they accounted for 15 percent of all federal arrests and 15 percent of all prosecutions for non-immigration related crimes in 2018. This indicates that non-U.S. citizens were about 2.3 times as likely to be arrested or prosecuted for non-immigration related crimes.

Last year, about 85 percent of federal arrests of non-U.S. citizens were for immigration offenses, and another five percent of the arrests were for immigration-related offenses. For perspective, in 1998, about 19,556 non-U.S. citizens were arrested for immigration offenses. By 2018, that number has ballooned to nearly 106,000 arrests — more than five times, or a 441 percent increase, the total of just 20 years ago.

For non-immigration offenses, the total of federal arrests for non-U.S. citizens between 1998 and 2018 increased nearly eight percent, and between 2017 and 2018 rose almost ten percent.

Non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted for illegal re-entry, that is illegal aliens who have been previously deported, drugs, fraud, alien smuggling, and misuse of visas.

A similar DOJ report released this year found that more than 88 percent of non-U.S. citizen federal convicts are illegal aliens who had been living in the country, Breitbart News reported. Of the nearly 30,000 non-citizen federal convicts sentenced between October 2017 and September 2018, about eight-in-nine were illegal aliens who had either crossed the southern border or overstayed their visa.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.