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With the possibility that the federal government under President-elect Donald Trump will use prior convictions to pursue up to 2 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, new data shows that more than half of all federal charges are linked to immigration crimes, easily surpassing federal prosecutions for firearms, drugs, and fraud.
Immigration offenses factor into 52 percent of all federal criminal prosecutions in fiscal year 2016, although immigration prosecutions fell by 7 percent. All but three of the top 10 crimes pursued by federal prosecutors are related to immigration.
In FY 2016, which ended September 30, prosecutors filed nearly 70,000 cases using seven crimes related to immigration as a basis — including improper entry, reentry of a deported alien, charges related to human smuggling, charges related to passport misuse, and the use of fraudulent documents.
The data was obtained from the Justice Department following a lawsuit by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research project supported by Syracuse University.
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