I guess falsely accusing Haitian Immigrants who are LEGALLY in Springfield Ohio of eating cats and dogs is not enough for Marc Molinaro Now he is demonizing undocumented immigrants by tweeting out an article from Fox News.
600,000 murderers, rapists, criminals who shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t get free housing and healthcare, and should be deported. @JoshRileyUE’s policy puts illegal immigrants ahead of us. https://t.co/w16pwUuOCS
— Marc Molinaro #NY19 (@marcmolinaro) September 28, 2024
Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with sex offenses and homicide convictions could be loose on the streets, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data provided to lawmakers this week.
The agency provided data to Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, about national data for illegal immigrants with criminal charges or convictions. The data, as of July 2024, is broken down by those in detention, and those who are not in detention -- known as the non-detained docket. The non-detained docket includes illegal immigrants who have final orders of removal or are going through removal proceedings but are not detained in ICE custody. There are currently more than 7 million people on that docket.
The data says that, among those not in detention, there are 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 with pending criminal charges.
ICE NON-DETAINED DOCKET EXPLODES TO 7.4M CASES
Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.
My bullshit detector went off immediately. This is how I responded to Molinaro's tweet. I've made few minor changes for consistency and to correct the spelling and grammar in my tweet.
This Fox report being pushed on us by @MarcMolinaro—the same guy who pushed the Haitians-eating-pets story--is a mishmash of sloppiness that doesn’t make sense. Let’s look at some figures according to the article.
https://foxnews.com/politics/tens-thousands-illegal-immigrants-sexual-as...
7,400,000: Number of people on the non-detained docket.
425,431 Number of convicted criminals on the non-detained docket
222,141 Number of people with criminal charges pending on the non-retained docket
647,572 Number of people who are either convicted criminals or have criminal charges pending on the non-retained docket
Let’s assume that every one of those who have criminal charges pending will be convicted. If that is the case, the criminality rate among all 7,400,000 on the non-detained docket is
647,572/7,400,000 = 8.8%Now, let’s look at the criminality rate of the American people as a whole. According to the Justice Department there are almost 80,000,000 Americans with a criminal history.
It is hard to decide how to interpret the 80,000,000 figure. I don’t know if it just includes those who have been convicted, or if it also includes those who were charged but never convicted. Let’s assume 20,000,000 of that figure were never convicted. That means there are 60,000,000 Americans who were criminally convicted.
340,000,000 Population of America
60,000,000/340,000,000 = 17.6% of Americans with a criminal historySo according to these figures, the percentage of Americans as a whole with a criminal history is twice as high as those on the non-detained list. Now, MAYBE the illegal immigrant population has a higher percentage of violent criminals than the American population as a whole does—that could be if Americans are committing mostly non-violent crime. But I can’t tell this one way or another from the statistics I can readily find available.
In addition, the Fox News article tells us there are 13,099 illegal aliens convicted of homicide on the NON-DETAINED LIST.
Really? Really?? REALLY???? How did they arrive at the 13,099 figure? That is an exact figure and obviously not an estimate. They must know who each of the 13,099 people are. How is it that they are not in prison or have not been deported??? If we know who these people are, then obviously we need more people to pick them up, do whatever processing is necessary, and either throw them in prison or deport them.
But the 13,099 figure sounds really high to me, especially in light of the fact that the overall percentage of convicted criminals among illegal aliens is significantly lower than that of the American people as a whole. It also seems to contradict other studies that show that illegal immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans. (Granted—there have not been many studies that looked into this, but what there are seem to confirm the common sense notion that illegal immigrants would be more careful not to commit the type of crimes that would attract the attention of law enforcement because they don’t want to be deported.)
See the Brennan Center’s Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave
See also New Cato Research Shows That Illegal Immigrants Are Less Likely to Be Convicted of Murder in Texas
Bottom line: We don’t know their methodology, and the timing of this data’s release is just a bit too convenient for Trump and the Republicans for it to be considered a coincidence. The only way to make sense of this mishmash of apparently non-peer reviewed statistics in this article is to assume it was put together by a bunch of hacks with a political ax to grind. View these statistics with caution.
I was right when I said that these statistics should be viewed with caution. Daniel Dale of CNN examined the claims being pushed by Donald Trump, Fox News, and Marc Molinaro and--SURPRISE SUPRISE--found them to be misleading.
Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular. ...
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” …
Trump’s posts left open the impression that the homicide offenders on the non-detained docket had foreign homicide convictions but were nonetheless allowed to cross the US border and live freely in this country. In reality, public data makes it clear that the overwhelming majority of people with criminal convictions on the non-detained docket were convicted in the US, as Sandweg and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which supports immigration, both told CNN.
Why aren’t these people in immigration detention if they have been convicted of a crime as serious as homicide? Under a 2001 Supreme Court decision, the US government is not allowed to indefinitely keep someone in immigration detention after they have been ordered removed from the country. So if someone has served their criminal sentence for homicide and then is ordered to be removed from the US, but their country is uncooperative with the US on immigration and won’t take them back, they must be released in the US — usually after no more than six months in immigration detention.
Reichlin-Melnick, who noted Saturday on social media that the non-detained docket includes people in jails and prisons, wrote on social media on Friday that “anyone on ICE’s non-detained docket with a homicide conviction has likely been in the country for decades, served a full criminal sentence, and can’t be removed because they’re from a country which restricts US deportations.”
So there you have it. Marc Molinaro's record of being a fear monger pushing misleading information about undocumented immigrants remains intact. It is fair game for him to say we have an illegal immigrant problem that needs to be fixed. But it is immoral to demonize an entire population with misleading statistics. Marc Molinaro is demonizing illegal immigrants for political gain today. But who will it be tomorrow? Molinaro can show that he has an ounce of decency and honor by correcting the record and apologizing to illegal immigrants. But I am not holding my breath. He has yet to apologize to the Haitians he has demonized who are living LEGALLY in Springfield Ohio. And he supports a guy who says that illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation.
Donald Trump vigorously denied that his phrase "poisoning the blood" was inspired by Adolf Hitler who wrote, "All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning." And you know what? I believe him. I believe he did not take this phrase from the Nazis. But I must note that Trump's and Molinaro's baseless accusation that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats bears the same odor as the blood libel that Nazis used to accuse Jews of baking the blood of Christian babies into their matzahs. I am also 100% certain that Molinaro was not inspired by Nazis to spread his blood libel against Haitians. But there is no need to connect Trump and Molinaro to the Nazis to reject the ugly rumors that they have spread. The fact that their rhetoric runs parallel to that of the Nazis should be enough to persuade you to vote for Kamala Harris and Molinaro's opponent, Josh Riley.
