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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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I don't think its total bullshit, they probably are picking up more rapists and murderers than just the general population.

I am not contesting that, in fact, I think I was conceding it explicitly. Naturally they have a higher crime rate than the native population. For the illegal immigrant laborer trying to get hired for anything at Home Depot, the idea "or perhaps I could just spend today stealing smartphones and wallets" sounds a lot more attractive than for someone working as a teller in a bank. Nor do I dispute that lower classes are generally more likely to solve an argument using violence. (In July 2019, the last month for which a detailed record exists on your site, about 2/3 of the deportees were male. That alone is sufficient to get a higher rate of rapists and murderers than the general population.)

A quarter of them have charges and another quarter have convictions (see below).

"ICE classifies an individual as a convicted criminal if they have been convicted of any criminal violation. Violations can range from serious felonies all the way down to a purely immigration violation (such as illegal entry which is a petty offense under the U.S. Code), or a violation which results in only in a fine such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, driving a vehicle with a tail light out, etc"

They point to the historical data, which shows the most serious conviction for July 2019:

Most Serious Criminal Conviction (MSCC) Total
All 55,654
No Conviction 38,978
Illegal Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1325 only) 2,938
Driving Under Influence Liquor 1,703
Assault 977
Traffic Offense 858
Larceny 457
Illegal Re-Entry (INA SEC.101(a)(43)(O), 8USC1326 only) 443
Domestic Violence 390
Burglary 382
Drug Trafficking 381
Robbery 279
Sex Assault 246
...
Homicide 123
...
Various specific kinds of homicide 57
Various manslaughter 47

Generally, homicides are a great anchor in criminology because the dark figure is thought to be rather small compared to the reported cases. Here, I will presume that the US is very unlikely to deport murderers to their countries of origin instead of charging and sentencing them, and that it is unlikely that homicides will have a worse crime on their rep sheet.

(There are nits to be picked in either direction, sure. Some people will commit an involuntary manslaughter and an armed robbery on separate occasions, and thus not show up in the homicide category. And some homicides are rather far from the central example of a homicide. The mother with three kids in her car who is distracted, oversees a red light and gets into an accident in which one of her kids is killed is a homicide, after all. And likely one of the 381 people whose MSCC is drug trafficking is also responsible for some gang-related killing for which he was not caught, just like there are murderers at large in the broader society.)

Still, this means that 0.4% of the deported were homicides, or 1.3% of the deported who were convicted of an offense were homicides. So much for Trump's murderers and rapists -- they are clearly part of the deported, at much higher rates than in the overall population, but still only a tiny fraction.

USC1325 (the most prominent one) for example is a 'duh' charge. Yes, most illegals from Latin America cross the borders illegally rather than overstaying a student visa they would be very unlikely to get.

In the current statistics, "Pending Criminal Charges" is even more wishy-washy. In the unlikely case that you want to deport an immigrant where Thiel's computer systems can not even find a single citation for jaywalking, you can just charge them with a trivial offense. Google AI thinks the statue of limitations for USC1325 is 5 years, so you can try to slap this on anyone who popped up on your radar in the last five years. The other ones likely filled out some form at some point, so you just charge them with some federal petty crime to that affect. The point is not that you would have to make the charges stick before a judge, after all. Just to have something so that you can tick "pending criminal charges", then deport them. You could just charge every one of them with desecrating the corpse of Lincoln, if you wanted.