President Trump has repeatedly said that building a wall along the Southern border will reduce crime and make Americans safer. And new government stats seem to back that up. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says about one in five federal prison inmates (21%) is a criminal alien--meaning an illegal alien who has committed a crime besides crossing the border. The report examines criminal alien arrests and incarcerations from 2011 to 2016 and finds more than 730,000 criminal aliens in federal or state prisons during that time, accounting for about 7.5 million crimes.
The GAO report follows other recent data showing the amount of crime committed by illegal immigrants. "The fact is, we have a lot of people coming to the United States who end up in our prisons, and you have a lot of victims along the way," says Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). He blames current U.S. immigration policy. "The same open borders that allow people to come in illegally to seek jobs and other opportunities in the United States, also provide an opportunity for criminals to enter the United States."
The illegal alien arrests cited in the GAO report include more than one million drug offenses, 133,000 sex offenses and more than 33,000 homicide-related offenses. The estimated cost to taxpayers to keep those criminal aliens behind bars is $2.5 billion a year.
Mehlman believes the solution starts with securing the border. "As long as you have this mass encouragement of people coming across the border illegally, it makes it easier for criminals to come into the United States also," he says. "If we started deterring people from coming here illegally simply to find jobs or to take advantage of benefits, we'd be able to focus our enforcement resources on the people who are not coming here for those reasons...in other words, those coming here to commit crimes."