What’s behind recent false claims about immigrants and crime in the US?

Sign on to social media these days and you’ll soon find posts warning about the threat of immigrants to your family’s – and your pets’ – safety.

Immigrants are eating the dogs, cats and geese in Springfield, Ohio, some posts have claimed. (They’re wrong.) They’re also taking over apartment complexes in Colorado and Chicago, or hijacking school buses in California, others have said. (No, they’re not. That’s false.)

Much of the rhetoric about a purported immigrant crime wave has stemmed from or was amplified by former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, his supporters and other high-profile conservatives on social media, such as X owner Elon Musk.

Trump has said immigrants “are poisoning the blood” of our country. He recently said in Wednesday’s campaign rally in Mint Hill, North Carolina, if Vice President Kamala Harris had closed the border years ago, “we wouldn’t have hostile takeovers of Springfield, Ohio, Aurora, Colorado, where they’re actually going in with massive machine-gun type equipment. They’re going in with guns that are beyond even military scope.”

Violent crimes in which immigrants are suspects have fueled the rhetoric, such as the slaying of Georgia college student Laken Riley, whose death came up in President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech in March. There are also real concerns about a growing presence of Venezuelan gangs in the US, say federal and local law enforcement.

But experts told PolitiFact – and crime statistics and studies show – that the rhetoric about immigrants and crime is often exaggerated or false.

Such rhetoric is nothing new, especially during a political campaign, experts said.

“Ever since the US has had migrants, a subset of them have been vilified,” Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminology professor and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said. The same thing is happening elsewhere, including the United Kingdom and Sweden, he added.

PolitiFact has debunked numerous claims about immigrants and crime:

There’s no evidence Haitian immigrants are eating pets, wildlife in Springfield

Perhaps no claim about immigrants and crime has garnered more attention than this one. In early September, social media posts flooded the internet with claims that Haitian immigrants, thousands of whom have flocked legally to Springfield in recent years, were eating residents’ pets and ducks and geese at local parks.

The claim is baseless, Springfield officials told PolitiFact and have said repeatedly.

It stemmed from a fourthhand account in a private Facebook group that went viral after a screenshot of the post was shared by the verified X account End Wokeness, whose post received nearly 5 million views. The Facebook post said a neighbour’s daughter’s friend came home from work to find a pet cat butchered and hanging from a tree in a Haitian neighbour’s yard. The post’s author said Haitians were doing the same to dogs and ducks and geese at a local park.

The woman behind the original post later told NBC News she had no firsthand knowledge of immigrants eating pets, and that she regrets the fallout from sharing the post. The neighbour referenced in her post told NewsGuard she also had no proof of the rumour.

The claims about eating pets and birds were further amplified on X and in interviews by Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. Trump repeated the baseless claim in his September 10 debate with Harris in Philadelphia, saying “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The Trump-Vance campaign persisted with their claims, pointing to a Federalist report about a person calling the Clark County Communications Center claiming to have seen four Haitians carrying geese. PolitiFact reported that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources followed up on the report but found no evidence to support the claim.

The claims have had a lasting impact on Springfield’s Haitian immigrants, many of whom told PolitiFact that they now fear for their safety.

A Venezuelan gang takeover in Aurora, Colorado? City officials, residents say no

After surveillance video showing what appears to be armed, Spanish-speaking men entering an Aurora, Colorado apartment complex, fears were stoked online about a Venezuelan gang seizing control of the building.

Social media posts said the men were part of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The claims were amplified on X by Elon Musk and Trump, who said in a September 6 interview that noncitizens “took over buildings” in Aurora.

Tren de Aragua formed in the Venezuelan state of Aragua more than a decade ago. It does have a presence in the US, but Aurora city officials and apartment residents at The Edge, the apartment building seen in the video, disputed claims that the gang took over the building, PolitiFact reported.

Residents at The Edge blamed poor conditions there on the landlord.

Reports about 32 Venezuelan armed migrants taking over a Chicago building are fake

As social media posts warning of migrants taking over neighborhoods across the country proliferated online, an audio recording of a police dispatcher in Chicago had high-profile accounts sharing the news that Venezuelan migrants had purportedly taken over a building there.

“Caller says 32 Venezuelans are trespassing the building, showing guns in the courtyard,” the dispatcher said.

PolitiFact reported that the Chicago Police Department said it received a service call about Venezuelans with guns trespassing, but the incident reported in the call was “not bona fide”.

The alderperson who represents the area where the incident was reported said the reports were untrue. So did migrants living in the building and residents in the area.

Two school buses filled with children weren’t hijacked by migrants in San Diego

Incidents involving two San Diego-area school bus routes sparked misinformation on social media that armed migrants were trying to hijack the buses, PolitiFact reported.

In separate incidents, groups of people approached two Jamul-Dulzura Union School District buses on Highway 94 in Dulzura, an unincorporated part of San Diego County.

On August 27, three men walked into the middle of Highway 94 and tried to stop a bus. The bus driver steered around the group in response. The next day, it appeared a group of about 20 people intended to board a school bus during morning pickup at a bus stop.

Officials said there was no attempted hijacking and no crimes were committed. Many migrants who crossed the San Diego-Mexico border are served in that area by humanitarian groups as they await processing. Some of the groups operate vehicles similar to school buses.

Assault suspect in Wisconsin wasn’t ‘released’ by Madison police

Police in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, arrested a man they said they believe is a member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang in the assault of a woman and her daughter in September.

That case became fodder for Republican political candidates, who claimed the suspect was arrested and released in Madison because of sanctuary city policies.

PolitiFact Wisconsin took a closer look at the case. It found that Madison police did have a warrant for the suspect’s arrest before the assault, but he was never in custody, the Dane County sheriff’s office and Madison police said. Madison also does not have an official sanctuary city policy, and the Dane County sheriff disputed claims that the department is “noncooperative” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What does the data show?

Studies have historically shown that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than US citizens. No available data backs claims that there is a migrant crime wave happening in the US, despite the online and political rhetoric.

There is no national data that tracks and correlates immigrants coming into the country with crime, and any research studies on the topic tend to lag behind releases of FBI crime statistics, experts told PolitiFact.

“If we pay attention to what the last 80 years of studies have told us, we would see, in general, that there’s likely to be no significant impact on crime” because of increased immigration, Charis Kubrin, a University of California, Irvine criminology, law and society professor, and member of the Council on Criminal Justice, said.

Several studies compared US citizens and immigrants in Texas, the only state that keeps immigration status records on people arrested and convicted of state crimes. They overwhelmingly found that noncitizens are less likely than citizens to be convicted or incarcerated.

Some examples:

• A July 2023 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at incarceration rates nationally of immigrants and US-born citizens over a 150-year period (1870 to 2020) and found immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated.
• A study of Texas data from 2012 to 2018 showed undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes.
• Two other studies out of Texas showed similar results. One published in 2000 showed immigrants with lower incarceration rates from homicide than US-born offenders. Another in 2021 comparing people incarcerated for homicide in Texas showed US citizens had higher crime rates than immigrants over the course of their criminal careers.
• A Cato Institute analysis comparing Texas’s homicide conviction rates among immigrants legally and illegally in the US and US citizens from 2013 to 2022 showed native-born Americans had the highest rate.
• The Marshall Project examined crime data in cities such as New York and Chicago after Texas. Governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants to what he called sanctuary cities. They found no link between crime and the recent migrant influx.

An FBI data release published on September 23, though not specific to immigration status, also dampens any claims of increased crime because of immigrants. That’s because US crime was down significantly in 2023, the most recent data available – violent crimes were down 3 percent from 2022 and property crimes were down 2.4 percent. Murder has dropped 11.6 percent, the data shows.

The FBI data “is inconsistent with the idea that an influx of migrants is driving up crime across the US”, said Graham Ousey, a College of William & Mary sociology professor. “If a recent surge of migrants was creating a crime wave, we’d expect the recent data to show this. It really does not.”

Ousey pointed us to more recent data from the Real-Time Crime Index which has tracked data through June 2024 that shows a drop in violent crime this year, including in big cities.

A July Council on Criminal Justice analysis showed violent crimes in US cities through June 2024 have dropped to or are slightly below pre-pandemic levels.

Another data point that dispels the notion of a rise in immigrant violent crime is a 30 percent spike in US homicides in 2020, the same year immigration dropped sharply because of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Michael Light, a sociology professor at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.

“In 2020 border crossings and apprehensions dropped dramatically, and yet, it was that year that the US saw the largest increase in homicide on record,” Light wrote in an email. “These homicide increases disproportionately involved young Black men, which again, suggest that they had little to do with immigration flows.”

Why are these false claims proliferating?

Experts told us a false narrative about immigrants and crime has proliferated for decades and is often heightened by politics.

Kubrin, who co-authored the book, Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, with Ousey, said these claims pop up during election cycles, or when crime rates are higher or immigration is increasing.

“There’s this kind of response to treat immigrants as the scapegoats for problems in American society,” Kubrin said, adding that social media has made the spread of such fears easier.

“There’s always these kind of moral panics about immigration,” Kubrin said.

Kubrin, who teaches a college class where students examine immigration in different time periods, cited the false claims out of Springfield, Ohio, as an example of a historical trope demonising immigrants as the “other” or as savages.

“It really taps into the xenophobia that many people have around otherness and foreign bornness,” Kubrin said. “On the one hand, it’s laughable and silly and ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s very dangerous.”

Ousey said the narrative about immigrant crime is an attempt to aid political objectives.

“When politicians amplify fears in the population, and then claim they (the politician) are the only ones capable of providing protection and security from whatever ‘threat’ creates the fear, the politician derives an electoral benefit,” Ousey said. “That’s the goal and that’s why they keep hammering on the narrative.”

Piquero said it’s rooted in a “long-standing theory called ‘minority threat,’” which holds that as a minority group grows and gains power, “the majority group becomes threatened and then they are vilified.”

There are real crimes committed by immigrants, Kubrin said, that shouldn’t be dismissed. But to extrapolate isolated cases and use language like “migrant crime wave” is problematic.