Topic: CNSNews.com
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey intoned in an Aug. 22 article:
Approximately 64 percent of the arrests that the federal government made in fiscal 2018 were of non-U.S. citizens, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
That represents a dramatic change from just two decades ago, when approximately 63 percent of federal arrests were of citizens and only approximately 37 percent were of non-citizens.
According to the data for fiscal years 1998 through 2018 that the BJS released today, federal arrests of non-U.S. citizen first surpassed federal arrests of citizens in fiscal 2008.
What Jeffrey refused to explicitly report about the increase: it's being driven by the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigration, not by any notable increase in violent crime. Jeffrey is misleading his readers by touting these inflated numbers.
Jeffrey waited until the fifth paragraph of his article to mention this, then tried to spin it: "Although immigration and immigration-related offenses accounted for the vast majority of non-U.S. citizen arrests, non-citizens were also over-represented among those arrested for non-immigration offenses, according to the report." That spin of attempting to portray non-citizens as violent criminals continued:
“The five crime types for which non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were illegal reentry (72 percent of prosecutions), drugs (13 percent of prosecutions), fraud (4.5 percent), alien smuggling (4 percent), and misuse of visas (2 percent).”
“Non-U.S. citizens, who make up 7 percent of the U.S. population (per the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017), accounted for 15 percent of prosecutions in U.S. district court for non-immigration crimes in 2018,” said the report.
“In 2018,” it said, “non-U.S. citizens accounted for 24 percent of all federal drug arrests and 25 percent of all federal property arrests, including 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests,” said the report.
But as the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh -- who conducted a study finding that non-citizens in the U.S. commit crimes at lower rates than citizens, a finding CNS' owner the Media Research Center tried and failed to discredit -- pointed out, those numbers are straight from the Justice Department and features "the most dramatic statistics displayed without context, nuance, or explanation — not a serious data analysis."
Jeffrey is putting pro-Trump sycophancy ahead of honestly reporting the facts. As CNS does.
