PETER NAVARRO: If we defund ICE, the body count of American lives would be too high
House and Senate Democrats are trying to turn two tragic federal shootings in Minneapolis into cause célèbres to shackle, slash and ultimately break the budgetary back of ICE. But let’s not pretend this political firestorm is about compassion or accountability.
If Democrats are successful in abruptly halting the deportation of what some estimates put at as many as 20 million illegal aliens imported under President Joe Biden, hundreds of additional American citizens would be murdered and thousands raped, assaulted or robbed by a violent subset of Biden’s illegal-alien horde.
Here is the statistical story behind America’s latest true-crime nightmare.
Numerous studies have analyzed the link between illegal aliens and crime. Using large administrative data sets, researchers have calculated — with surprising precision — the rates at which illegal aliens commit various crimes. From those rates, it is simple arithmetic to estimate how many Americans would fall prey to new illegal-alien violence.
Start with homicide.
The Cato Institute has examined one of the largest and most credible data sets available, drawn from the border state of Texas, and found that for every 100,000 illegal aliens, about 2.2 Americans are murdered. Using essentially the same Texas data, the Center for Immigration Studies corrects for delayed identification and other methodological issues and arrives at a homicide rate of roughly 3.9 per 100,000 in one illustrative year.
Apply those rates to Biden’s 20 million new illegal aliens, and the result is stark: between 440 and 780 additional Americans would be murdered.
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That’s not a statistic. That’s a slaughterhouse.
Past victims already have names.
Laken Riley, 22, murdered in Georgia after prosecutors said she resisted a rape attempt by José Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal alien previously released after arrest.
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Jocelyn Nungaray, 12, was strangled to death in Houston in June 2024. Two Venezuelan nationals — Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Jose Peña Ramos — are charged with capital murder. Both had entered the United States illegally, were apprehended near El Paso, Tex., and were released with notices to appear before the killing. They remain in the Harris County Jail awaiting trial, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Rachel Morin, raped and murdered on a Maryland trail by the El Salvadoran Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez.
Kayla Hamilton, a 20-year-old Maryland woman with autism, raped and strangled by Walter Javier Martinez, an illegal alien from El Salvador who had entered the United States only months earlier."
Future victims would have names, faces, families, and dreams, too — every bit as sympathetic as Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
And homicide is only the tip of Biden’s illegal alien iceberg.
According to a National Institute of Justice–funded study published in 2020 using Texas Department of Public Safety arrest data (2012–2018), felony arrest rates per 100,000 undocumented immigrants were 11.3 for felony sexual assault, 77.8 for felony assault, 18.2 for felony burglary, and 136.0 for felony drug violations.
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Scaled to 20 million illegal aliens, that arithmetic implies roughly 2,260 more Americans would be sexually assaulted, 3,640 American homes burglarized, 15,560 Americans violently assaulted, and 27,200 felony drug arrests involving dealers, traffickers, smugglers and hard-core possession cases.
These are the kind of inconvenient statistics Hill denizens like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Democrat Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and sanctuary politicos like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Illinois Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker and Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz don’t want to compute — and pure evil they don’t want you to see.
As misdirection, the left also loves to point out that many studies conclude crime rates among illegal aliens are marginally lower than those of American citizens. But that is the wrong yardstick.
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Even if illegal aliens have a lower crime rate — and the data is far from clear — when millions of illegal aliens enter the country, the absolute number of crimes increases. You don’t need to be a mathematician — or illegal alien crime victim — to understand that.
There is also this: the older data sets used by many analysts today almost certainly understate the danger posed by the most recent Biden-era wave. Why?
Because countries around the world like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela deliberately opened their prisons and released violent criminals during the latest border breakdown — both to reduce crime at home and export crime to America.
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That’s the statistics. Here’s the politics.
The strange bedfellows coalition out to kneecap ICE is led by Democrats playing the long electoral game who view illegal aliens as political pawns and funded by corporate interests that benefit from cheaper labor and wage suppression. Throw in the drug and human-trafficking cartel supply chains and a legacy media blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome, and you have today’s government shutdown crisis.
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It is our job to resist. Because "defund ICE" doesn’t just mean fewer deportations.
It means more empty seats at dinner tables. More funerals. More shattered lives — in addition to all the jobs American citizens lose.
Republicans must do a far better job holding ranks on Capitol Hill and messaging these essential Secure Border Trump truths.
And Democrats would do well to remember one of the major reasons why they lost the last election. A supermajority of Americans wants both secure borders and mass deportations. For their safety. For their jobs. For their wages. For their culture.