States, Feds Don’t Track Crimes by Illegals
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Although illegal aliens have been responsible for assorted violent crimes and other felonies on US soil—including the murders of several police officers—a Gun Week investigation has revealed that neither state nor federal agencies specifically keep track of such crimes.
Granted, only a small number of illegal aliens commit violent crimes on US soil. But border watch activists have repeatedly expressed concerns that with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pouring across the border despite interceptions by law enforcement, the tide brings with it an assortment of troublemakers.
Incredibly, many police agencies are prohibited by local law or regulation from even ascertaining the nationality of criminal suspects when they are arrested. An official with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), who requested anonymity, told Gun Week that there is “no uniform system” for keeping specific data on violent crimes committed by people who are in this country illegally.
“It’s not a question that is asked by police departments,” the official acknowledged. “Congress would have to pass a law and require us to do it, and fund it. . . . Good statistics cost money.”
One law enforcement source in Seattle, WA, acknowledged that Seattle police and King County sheriff’s deputies are actually forbidden to ask a suspect’s citizenship status. Such rules are called “sanctuary policies.”
Gun Week checked with not only BJS, but with the FBI and law enforcement agencies in several states. Agencies in Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Washington—states with a high estimated number of illegal aliens—all said pretty much the same thing: They do not keep track of crimes committed by illegals.
The only data that comes close to keeping track of crimes committed by aliens in this country came from a BJS website that reported that in 1997, there were more “non-citizens” in federal prisons than in state prisons. However, the figure did not reflect whether those “non-citizens” were in this country legally or illegally, only that they were in prison. That year, about 18% of the federal prison population was non-citizen, while 5% of the state prison population was so identified.
In 2000, according to the same website, “an estimated 57% of federal inmates and 21% of state inmates were serving a sentence for a drug offense; about 10% of federal inmates and 49% of state inmates were in prison for a violent offense.”
One group, the US Border Control, notes on its website that an estimated 30% of the 2 million prisoners in the nation’s prisons are illegal aliens. Housing them costs an estimated $1.6 billion annually.
Only one state, Arizona, was able to provide Gun Week with a specific number of illegal aliens now in its prisons. There are presently 4,155 illegal immigrants incarcerated in Arizona prisons, according to a source with that state’s Department of Corrections.
This revelation stunned Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He told Gun Week that it is ironic that many anti-gun politicians and gun control activists continue to fight for tighter gun controls on American citizens when some of the most vicious crimes are being committed by people who are in this country illegally.
“Here are cases of people committing violent gun crimes who aren’t even citizens,” Gottlieb observed, “yet the gun control lobby and anti-gun lawmakers want to pass laws that impact the rights of law-abiding, gun owning citizens.”
While there is no formal database of crimes, there are some websites devoted to tracking some of the more notorious crimes committed by illegal aliens. Other websites discuss the situation in the broader political sense.
Five years ago, two researchers—Rebecca L. Clark and Scott A. Anderson—did a paper on the subject of illegal aliens in federal, state and local criminal justice systems when they were with the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. That paper, published in June 2000, came from research funded by a Justice Department grant.
It noted that six states had previously filed lawsuits to force the federal government to provide reimbursement for criminal justice costs associated with illegal aliens. The report noted that “none of these suits has been successful.”
However, that report does shed considerable light on what appears to be a major problem. Clark and Anderson, who have left the Urban Institute, obtained information from the Pretrial Services Act Information System (PSAIS) and the US Sentencing Commission (USSC). They learned that in 1995, there were more than 4,000 illegal aliens sentenced in federal district courts. That same year, they reported, “The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) identified 14,262 illegal aliens among state prisoners in 1995 from California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and New Jersey.”
On the Border
Concern over violent criminal acts committed by illegal aliens is one reason that hundreds of citizens turned out over the past month in Arizona for the “Minuteman Project” to monitor illegal alien traffic crossing the border from Mexico.
While the first several days of the effort became something of a media circus, there were early indications that it had a significant effect. Mexican troops and law enforcement agencies showed up in force to deter illegal crossings, and border crossings along the stretch that was monitored did drop dramatically.
The Minuteman Project was an offshoot of a citizen border watch program started two years ago by Chris Simcox, publisher and editor of The Tombstone Tumbleweed newspaper. He has become something of a thorn in the side of Border Patrol officials and liberal activists, who prefer to call the illegals “undocumented immigrants.”
Political correctness does not address one major concern: violent crimes.
One source with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office, told Gun Week that some criminals have fled back to Mexico, but that her state has gotten serious about bringing those fugitives back for trial. Last year, she said, the state successfully extradited two fugitives from Mexico, and they are working on more.
Deadly Toll
However, a handful of extraditions hardly balances against the number of violent crimes committed by certain individuals. As noted earlier, various websites on the Internet focus on violent crimes committed by illegal aliens. Here are a few that Gun Week found:
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Park Ranger Kris Eggle was gunned down on Aug. 9, 2002, apparently by Mexican drug dealers he encountered on patrol. The killers were using the park as a route to smuggle drugs into this country.
The last three peace officers killed in the line of duty in eastern Washington state were all victims of apparent illegal aliens. Chelan County, WA, Sheriff’s Deputy Saul Gallegos was shot and killed by Jose Sanchez Guillen on the afternoon of June 26, 2003. Guillen was arrested three days later about 100 miles away.
Washington State Trooper James E. Saunders was gunned down on Oct. 7, 1999 in Pasco by Nicolas Solorio Vasquez, an illegal alien who had been deported three times and kept returning. He was arrested on drug charges on July 26, 1999 but the INS did not pick him up for a fourth deportation.
Omak, WA, Officer Michael W. Marshall was shot and killed by Juan Gonzales on Mar. 26, 1998. Gonzales had also been deported three times previously, but now he is serving a life sentence without parole.
Winchester, VA, police Sgt. Ricky Timbrook was slain in October 1999 by Edward Nathaniel Bell, who originally came here as a resident alien from Jamaica. He had been arrested in 1997 on gun charges by Timbrook, and he was convicted. While the INS was pursuing deportation, Bell was able to bail out of jail, and managed to delay his case several times.
Los Angeles, CA, Sheriff’s Deputy David March was gunned down on Apr. 29, 2002 by a man identified as Armando Garcia, who remains a fugitive in Mexico, which apparently refuses to extradite him because he faces the death penalty if tried in an American court. Garcia had been deported several times and was convicted for at least two felonies here. As recently as December, Los Angeles county officials were appealing to Mexican President Vicente Fox to have Garcia extradited.
And perhaps the most notorious of all illegal aliens is Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenage accomplice to John Allan Muhammad. They are better known as the “Beltway Snipers,” convicted in the murders of several people in the fall of 2002 in northern Virginia and southern Maryland, and the Washington, DC-area. Both are now in prison.
Blaming Guns
With each sensational gun crime, no matter who the perpetrator happens to be or whether he had a firearm legally or otherwise, the response from gun control proponents predictably focuses on firearm access, not misuse.
For example, Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, recently complained in an opinion piece about efforts by gun rights organizations to expand concealed carry legislation in several states.
“With somewhere around 200 million guns in private hands in the United States, our society hardly suffers from a shortage of firearms,” Horwitz lamented, “and it is not clear why adding millions more would make us safer. In fact, other cultures that have reached this level of individual armament have done so at their own peril.”
There is mounting evidence that gun controls have not worked, though gun rights advocates say this country’s myriad gun laws have certainly worked to prevent law-abiding citizens from easily acquiring firearms. Waiting periods, background checks, licensing and registration schemes have all been tried in different areas, and none has been shown to have prevented a single crime, the gun rights community insists.
Gun laws have not kept illegal aliens from obtaining firearms, as anyone observing southern California’s gang problem can attest. According to an essay called The Illegal Alien Crime Wave published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and written by Heather MacDonald, “A full 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide, which totaled 1,500 last year in Los Angeles, pointed to illegal aliens. Soberingly, two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants, totaling 17,000, were for illegal aliens. In 1995, a report showed that 60% of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in Southern California included illegal aliens. That gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia on drug distribution schemes, extortion and drive-by assassinations. MS-13 Salvadoran gangs from Central America, with over 8,000 members, operate in 28 American cities.”
These outlaws do not obtain their guns through legal channels. Yet gun laws in this country have been written primarily to regulate the legal trade in firearms. It is because proponents of such laws sold them as strategic moves to stop crime.
Where gun rights advocates and people involved in April’s Minuteman Project along the Arizona border would probably agree is that the failure of gun laws is like the failure of government. All the laws already on the books have not stopped gun crimes, and neither have government efforts succeeded in stemming the flow of illegal aliens across the borders.
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