A new investigation has revealed that 30 per cent of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes have been charged with other offenses, including attempted murder, child molestation and rape, in spite of federal officials’ claims that such criminals rarely re-offend.
The Boston Globe investigation shows that of the 323 criminal immigrants released from prison in New England between 2008 and 2012, 30 per cent re-offended ‒ a rate four times higher than that estimated by officials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Gary Mead, the executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told a House Judiciary Subcommittee in 2011 that just seven per cent of undocumented immigrants released in the preceding two years had reoffended, but in reality recidivism has been shown to be considerably higher by the Globe’s review of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont records.
It took The Boston Globe three years to conduct its investigation, with staff members searching internet databases, media reports, police logs and court records to identify criminal immigrants that had re-offended. The Globe uncovered a number of specific crimes, including a Massachusetts man who served jail time for assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The crime saw him marked for deportation, but he was instead released, and then went on to find and murder the same woman.
A total of 86,288 immigrant criminals all over the United States have been released by ICE between 2013 and 2015, butthe agency claims to have no information on the rates of re-offenders prior to 2013.