by James A. Bacon

Governor Glenn Youngkin issued a press release yesterday highlighting the success of the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force, which, in cooperation with federal authorities, has made 521 arrests since February 25, including 132 individuals affiliated with MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and other transnational criminal gangs.

Markus Schmidt with the Virginia Mercury covered the story with an article that quoted extensively from the press release without distortions or cherry-picking of data (which means he’s not yet ready to work for The Washington Post). So, kudos to Schmidt for that.

Sadly, however, he chose to assault readers with this down-the-rabbit-hole logic:

A 2024 report funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at significantly lower rates than U.S.-born citizens.… The findings challenge an unproven core assumption underlying the rhetoric around initiatives like the VHSTF — that undocumented immigrants pose an outsized threat to public safety.

First of all, I don’t recall any such rhetoric, at least not here in Virginia. Who, precisely, in the Youngkin administration has suggested that illegal immigrants pose a greater threat to public safety than legal immigrants and native-born Americans? The main theme I’ve gleaned from public statements is this: If someone entered the U.S. illegally, and he commits a crime, we’re going to deport him.

Second, the claim that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than others may or may not be true in Virginia. We don’t know. The National Institute of Justice study was based on violent crimes in Texas. Here in Virginia, the Virginia State Police 2013 Crime in Virginia report breaks down violent crimes by race but not by Hispanic ethnicity, much less by immigration status.

Even if we had the data and it replicated the Texas findings, we’d have to wrestle with the likelihood that, for obvious reasons, illegal immigrants are less likely to report crimes than people living here legally. Might wives be less likely to report their husbands for spousal abuse if they think he could get shipped back to Central America? Might victims of sex trafficking be less likely to step forward if they think they could get deported? Such potential biases in the data cannot be ignored.

The professional hand wringers who seek to expand the rights of criminal illegals ignore an even larger point: what about their victims? Illegal-alien criminals prey overwhelmingly upon members of their own ethnic communities. Their victims are overwhelmingly immigrants themselves. Where’s the compassion for them?

Count on the likes of the National Institute of Justice and “progressive” members of the Virginia General Assembly to get weepy over the rights of the predators. If anyone wants to know why almost half of all Hispanics voted for Donald Trump despite his ugly remarks a decade ago about Mexicans and rapists, I feel certain it’s because they know that he wants to evict the criminals in their midst while Democrats want to protect them. Living in their safe, upper-middle-class neighborhoods, White progressives are oblivious to such realities.

For purposes of argument, let’s set aside all the caveats noted above. Even if it’s true that criminality is less rampant among illegal immigrants, so what? Does the good behavior of the majority absolve the lawbreaking of the minority? Do Salvadoran sex traffickers get a pass just because most Salvadoran immigrants living in the U.S. are good, honest people who work hard and care for their families? What tortured tangle of logic leads to the conclusion that lawbreakers living illegally in the U.S. shouldn’t be hunted down and dispatched to their home countries?