Ted Cruz blames migrants in US illegally for murders, rapes, assaults. How common is it?
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s Republican National Convention speech Tuesday focused on the impact of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. He claimed that “every day Americans are dying— murder, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.
“Teenage girls and boys, wearing colored wrist bands are being sold into a life of sex slavery,” Cruz continued. “This is evil, and it’s wrong, and it’s happening every damn day.”
He later went on to say that, “Today as a result of Joe Biden’s presidency, your family is less safe. Your children are less safe. The country is less safe.”
But experts say people who enter the U.S. illegally are not more likely to commit crime.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the Star-Telegram in May that people who enter the country illegally are not drivers of crime.
“When you look at the data, the data shows quite strongly — this is specifically data from the Texas prison system — that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, though at slightly higher rates than people who come through the legal immigration system,” he said at the time. “So we know that there’s really no correlation between increased migrant arrivals and spikes in crime.”
Some have argued that any crime committed by a person in the country illegally is too many. That argument has “a certain strength to it,” but misses the broader picture, Reichlin-Melnick said in his earlier interview with the Star-Telegram.
“Because undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates, the more undocumented immigrants are in that area, the lower the overall crime rate will be, even if the raw number of crimes might go up slightly,” he said. “They are not drivers of crime.”
Locally, law enforcement officials have not been able to provide data or documentation showing an increase of crime rates in their communities as a result of people living in the country illegally.
Cruz pointed to several specific instances of crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally in his remarks before Republican National Convention delegates in Milwaukee.
He mentioned Kate Steinle, who was shot in San Francisco. The man accused of killing her is a Mexican citizen and had been deported five times, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. He was acquitted in 2017 of murder and homicide. A conviction for being a felon in possession of a gun was later overturned by an appellate court, according to the newspaper.
Cruz also noted Laken Riley, a nursing student killed at the University of Georgia. The man charged in her killing is a migrant from Venezuela who entered the United State illegally in 2022, according to ABC news. Cruz mentioned Rachel Morin of Maryland, whose brother spoke at the convention Tuesday. A man from El Salvador who was in the country illegally is accused of raping and murdering Morin, according to CBS News.
Cruz referred to Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Houston whose accused killers are Venezuelan migrants who entered the country illegally, according to The New York Times.
“Tonight, I speak for Kate and Laken and Rachael,” Cruz said in the speech. “Tonight I speak for Jocelyn.”
Macarena Martinez, a spokesperson for Cruz, said in a statement that Cruz’s speech was not about statistics.
“In his speech last night, Sen. Cruz noted that the victims of illegal alien crime are not statistics, ‘They’re our daughters, our sisters, our friends,” the statement reads. “The families don’t care about the empty numbers. They care about the empty chairs at the dinner table, about the voices they’ll never hear again, about the laughter lost, and about the dreams that will never be fulfilled.’ His speech wasn’t about statistics, it was about Kate Steinle, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Jocelyn Nungaray, and if you’re writing about his speech you need to write about them.”
This story was originally published July 17, 2024 at 2:47 PM.
