You’re More Likely to Be Killed by ICE/CBP Than by an Undocumented Immigrant
And the government is lying about it.
Note: Sources and data methods follow the article text.
Nine people have been murdered by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) so far this month, with one additional death still listed as “under investigation.”
What has followed these deaths has not been confusion or restraint. It has been lying, denial, and victim-blaming, justified under the same false pretense the Trump regime has leaned on relentlessly — that this violence is necessary to “protect Americans from dangerous immigrants.”
That claim collapses the moment you look at the data.
Across the entire United States in 2025, only eight verified cases of homicide by undocumented immigrants can be substantiated through media coverage and official statements.
Eight. Nationwide.
And even those cases come with serious caveats — many remain pending, several involve defendants who have pled not guilty, and immigration status is often asserted solely by ICE or DHS officials, agencies that have repeatedly demonstrated they are not reliable narrators.
By contrast, by January 24, 2026, ICE and CBP had already killed nine people — more than the total number of homicides attributed to undocumented immigrants in all of 2025.
Thus we reach the inconvenient truth the regime would rather hide:
You are more likely to be killed by ICE or CBP than by an undocumented immigrant.
That is not rhetoric. It is arithmetic.
And the comparison does not stop there.
You’re nearly 200 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than by an undocumented immigrant.
Such a simple, indisputable fact should not come as a surprise. And yet, every time I share this data, I encounter skepticism from all sides of the political spectrum. From the right, it is dismissed as anti-police rhetoric. From the center, it is treated as an uncomfortable anomaly. From parts of the left, it is often acknowledged abstractly and then quickly set aside, as though naming it too plainly might be impolite.
But the numbers are not subtle.
In 2025, police killed 1,314 people in the United States. That figure alone dwarfs the number of homicides attributed to undocumented immigrants — not just in 2025, but across multiple years. It also places ICE and CBP violence in its proper context. Federal immigration enforcement is not an aberration. It is part of a broader ecosystem of state force that kills routinely, disproportionately, and with remarkably little accountability.
Once you see that pattern, the fixation on “dangerous immigrants” becomes impossible to miss. It asks the public to fear a statistically negligible threat while accepting — or ignoring — a demonstrably lethal one. It trains people to scrutinize the actions of the powerless while granting armed agents of the state an almost automatic presumption of legitimacy.
And behind that data are the lives that mattered — lives taken in state-sanctioned executions in front of the entire world.
Alex Pretti, Renée Good, and Keith Porter were killed by ICE officers.
Herber Sanchez Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunos Campos were killed in CBP custody
These are not abstractions or “incidents.” They are people whose deaths were caused by the federal government, followed by press releases designed to absolve the agencies responsible and indict the victims instead.
In nearly every case, the script has been the same. A killing occurs. A statement is issued within hours. The dead are framed as a threat. The agents are framed as having “no choice.” Video evidence, when it exists, is ignored or dismissed. Contradictions are explained away. Accountability is deferred indefinitely.
Too often, major media outlets repeat these official narratives with little pushback. Phrases like feared for safety or resisted arrest are reproduced verbatim, while qualifiers and contradictions are buried deeper in the article or delayed until attention has already shifted. When video later contradicts the official version — as it has again and again — the correction never travels as far as the lie.
But something has changed, and the state no longer fully controls the story.
We are watching these murders happen on video. We are hearing the gunshots. We are seeing bodies fall. And then we are watching government officials insist, sometimes within hours, that what we saw was not what we saw.
That rupture matters. It has changed how people respond. Protests, lawsuits, and widespread refusals to accept official accounts did not arise from ideology alone — they arose from evidence. From the repeated experience of watching reality collide with a press release and losing faith in the institutions issuing it.
Meanwhile, the supposed justification for all of this — crime by undocumented immigrants — is treated in precisely the opposite way. A single violent act, however rare, is elevated into a national parable. Immigration status is foregrounded even when it has no relevance to the crime itself. Patterns are implied where none exist. Context disappears.
Decades of research tell a very different story. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are less likely to commit violent crime than U.S.-born citizens. Communities with higher immigrant populations often experience lower crime rates, not higher ones. Undocumented immigrants are arrested and incarcerated for violent offenses at lower rates than native-born residents. These findings are not controversial within criminology — they are well established.
What is discussed far less is that immigrants are often more likely to be victims of crime. Fear of deportation suppresses reporting. Abusers exploit that fear. Violence goes uncounted. Harm compounds quietly, while the narrative insists the danger lies elsewhere.
The same dynamic governs how ICE and CBP violence is counted — or, more accurately, how it isn’t. There is no comprehensive, real-time public database tracking deaths caused by federal immigration enforcement. Reporting is fragmented. Oversight is internal. Investigations are slow-walked. Deaths in custody are softened into “medical events,” even when negligence or abuse is documented.
In 2025 alone, 32 people were killed by ICE over the course of the year. Another 18 were killed in CBP custody last year — up from a total of three in 2022. Those figures mark a tripling of ICE-related deaths compared to the previous year. At the current pace, ICE and CBP are poised to triple that number again. That should have triggered hearings. It didn’t.
This is the broader pattern. Every authoritarian project requires an enemy — someone frightening enough to justify extraordinary power, and vulnerable enough to be crushed without consequence.
Immigrants, especially undocumented ones, are cast in that role with brutal efficiency. Rare crimes are magnified. Entire communities are treated as suspect. The state presents itself as protector even as its agents kill with increasing frequency.
This is not about public safety. If it were, the data would matter.
What we are witnessing is the normalization of state violence through fear — fear manufactured, amplified, and laundered through media repetition. When the lie holds that immigrants are uniquely dangerous, the state can kill with less scrutiny, and the dead can be blamed for their own deaths.
Behind all of this are people — an ICU nurse shot point-blank in the back of the head, a mother shot three times in the face while sitting in her car, and families forced to watch officials defame their loved ones in real time. Immigrant families who stay silent not because they are dangerous, but because they know the state is.
You are not living through an epidemic of violence by undocumented immigrants.
You are living through an era of expanding, unaccountable state violence, justified by a lie.
The videos have made that harder to hide.
The numbers make it harder still.
What happens next is not a matter of interpretation — it is a matter of choice.
Accountability does not arrive on its own. It has to be demanded. It has to be forced into the open by people willing to refuse the lie, challenge the press release, and insist that federal agencies do not get to kill and then grade their own homework.
That means demanding independent investigations into every ICE and CBP killing — not internal reviews, not delayed Inspector General reports, but real accountability with subpoena power.
It means refusing to accept “under investigation” as an endpoint.
It means calling out media outlets that repeat state narratives without scrutiny and rewarding the ones that do the harder work of verification.
It means pressuring elected officials — especially those who claim to care about civil rights — to stop funding agencies that operate with impunity and start treating these deaths as what they are: failures of governance and law.
It also means rejecting the scapegoating at the heart of this violence.
Immigrants — documented or undocumented — are not the threat. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our families. The threat is a state that kills in their name, lies about it afterward, and relies on fear to keep the public quiet.
History is clear about where that road leads. So is the data.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence is permission.
If this country is going to claim the rule of law means anything at all, then law enforcement — including federal immigration enforcement — must be subject to it. No more exemptions. No more euphemisms. No more bodies quietly added to a tally most people are never meant to see.
The choice is simple, even if the work is not: either we hold them accountable now, or we accept that this violence will continue, expand, and eventually come for people who no longer fit anyone’s definition of “safe.”
That decision belongs to all of us.
FOR MORE DATA AND INSIGHT
I’ve always argued that subject matter expertise is invaluable in statistics. Anyone can look up numbers and apply basic arithmetic. Understanding the data, its limitations, implications, takes knowledge and experience specific to the field the data concerns.
Which is why I recommend all of you follow/subscribe to a friend of mine, and fellow Syracuse alum, Austin Kocher, who works on one of the most comprehensive data resources for ICE abductions and confinement that you’ll find. Austin also publishes easy-to-understand guides and visuals here on Substack for free.
Sources
https://www.ice.gov/detain/detainee-death-reporting
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/ice-inspections-plummeted-as-detentions-soared-in-2025
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr
https://oig.dhs.gov/reports
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org
https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/law-enforcement/use-force
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunking-myth-immigrants-and-crime
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave
https://www.asanet.org/sociological-research-reveals-how-immigrants-can-reduce-crime
https://www.glovisa.org/immigration-and-crime
https://www.nilc.org/issues/immigration-enforcement/immigrant-survivors-of-crime/
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/immigrant-access-justice
https://www.themarshallproject.org
Data Methods & Caveats: Victims of homicides committed by undocumented immigrants
This list documents U.S.-based homicide victims in calendar year 2025 for whom credible media reporting or official government statements explicitly stated that the accused suspect was undocumented or had illegally entered the United States. A case was included only when the death was investigated and charged as a homicide, the victim was identified as a specific individual or explicitly referenced by authorities (named or unnamed), and the suspect’s immigration status was clearly attributed to law enforcement, prosecutors, ICE/DHS, the Department of Justice, or a major news organization citing those authorities.
Sources for this dataset include local and national news outlets, sheriff’s offices, police departments, county State’s Attorney announcements, and federal DOJ press releases. No cases were included based on social media claims, political rhetoric, or aggregation sites without primary sourcing. In every instance, the immigration-status detail comes from reporting that explicitly attributes the information to law enforcement or federal authorities, and links to that coverage are provided.
Where a victim’s name was publicly released, it is listed. Where a victim’s name was not released in accessible reporting, the victim is listed as “Unknown.” Victim citizenship is not assumed or inferred. In practice, most homicide reporting does not specify citizenship at all, so this dataset reflects U.S.-based victims, not confirmed U.S. citizens. That distinction matters, and it is intentional.
It is also important to note that immigration status is not systematically reported in homicide cases and is often disclosed selectively. In many cases, the information appears early in an investigation and reflects allegations or law-enforcement statements, not findings established at trial. Terminology varies by source—“undocumented,” “illegal alien,” “illegally entered”—and the language used here mirrors the language used in the original reporting rather than imposing a single label.
There is no national database that tracks homicide victims by offender immigration status, and many homicide cases never include that information at all. The absence of a case from this table does not mean no other such cases occurred in 2025; it means the information was not publicly disclosed in a way that met the inclusion criteria above.
Finally, this dataset is not suitable for rate comparisons, demographic generalizations, or claims about crime trends by immigration status. It exists to document specific cases where immigration status was made public, to examine how and when that disclosure occurs, and to ground discussions in verifiable facts rather than viral lists, anecdotes, or political talking points.
Norma Ramirez-Martinez — Alpine Township, Michigan (Feb 22, 2025)
https://www.fox17online.com/news/local-news/kent/alpine-township-deadly-shooting-suspect-is-in-the-country-illegally-per-ice
https://wwmt.com/news/arc/alpine-township-shooting-grand-rapids-gilberto-hernandez-mendez-norma-ramirez-martinez-tabor-rd
Camillia Williams — Marietta, Georgia (Mar 11–12, 2025)
The suspect has pled not guilty.
https://apnews.com/article/2415822948f1baaa5dc7656cbfd0af6b
Miguel Ramirez Quiroz — Security-Widefield, Colorado (Mar 24, 2025)
https://epcsheriffsoffice.com/victim-identified-in-crawford-avenue-homicide/
https://www.koaa.com/news/crime/victim-identified-from-homicide-investigation-undocumented-immigrant-arrested
Larisha Sharell Thompson — Lancaster County, South Carolina (May 2, 2025)
Five teens, ages 13-18, were charged in the shooting-murder of a woman in her vehicle.
https://www.kgns.tv/2025/05/13/sheriff-says-6-charged-womans-death-including-minors-could-be-deported-us/
https://people.com/south-carolina-murder-larisha-thompson-11736911
DaCara Thompson — Prince George’s / Anne Arundel County, Maryland (Aug 22–31, 2025)
https://wjla.com/news/local/undocumented-immigrant-indicted-murder-missing-19-maryland-woman-dacara-thompson-guatamalan-langley-park-suv-detectives-hyattsville-police-tampering-prince-georges
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/05/dacara-thompson-man-charged-murder/
Charminy Lewis — Telferner, Texas (Oct 3, 2025)
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/2025/10/04/victim-in-telferner-shooting-homicide-identified/
https://www.jacksonconews.com/article/1337%2Csuspect-apprehended-shooting-death-in
Unknown victim 1 (81-year-old victim) — San Antonio, Texas (Feb 1–2, 2025)
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2025/02/02/murder-suspect-held-on-ice-detainer-accused-of-being-in-us-illegally-source-says/
Unknown victim 2 — Reston, Virginia (Dec 17, 2025)
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/illegal-alien-marvin-fernando-morales-ortez-faces-federal-charges-following-arrest
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Yes, Kocher is good, no doubt about it. But you're pretty darn good, too, RJ!