U.S. citizens were more than twice as likely to be charged with a crime in Harris County in 2023 than adults who don’t hold U.S. citizenship, according to an exclusive data analysis by the Houston Landing.
The analysis, based on the most recent data on the county’s adult population and criminal charges, shows that U.S. citizens have been more likely to be charged with a crime in Harris County since at least 2015, the earliest data collected by the Landing through public records law.
Compared to county population totals, U.S. citizens were also more likely to be charged with violent crimes related to murder, homicide and manslaughter.
“The data does not surprise me, that data is consistent,” said former Houston Police Department chief Charles McClelland, who led the Houston Police Department from 2010 to 2016.
The data echoes many past studies nationwide and in Texas that show immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than U.S. citizens, running counter to the rhetoric of the Trump administration and some state and local politicians who support ramping up deportations under the guise of public safety. Statewide, native-born citizens are also nearly twice as likely to be charged with a crime, according to research by the Cato Institute.
Meanwhile, both immigration and law enforcement experts have expressed concern that individual cases, such as the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston in June 2024, are being used to justify punitive immigration policies.
When immigrants are conflated with criminals, all immigrants in the community are impacted, according to Katy Murdza, a Houston-based Texas regional organizer for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a national organization supporting immigrant rights.
“It is making many of our family members, our friends, our neighbors, afraid to go to work, afraid to go to school, or even run errands, and that does create a ripple effect through the community,” said Murdza.
Tracking citizenship
According to crime data obtained by the Houston Landing earlier this year, U.S. citizens made up 76% of all people over the age of 18 who were charged with a crime in Harris County since 2015. Non-citizens, meanwhile, have made up less than 10% of all defendants during this time.
In 2023, 1,766 adult U.S. citizens were charged with a crime out of every 100,000 adult citizens in Harris County, more than double the rate of those without U.S. citizenship.
Citizenship information is collected as part of the jail intake process, where every person booked in Harris County Jail is asked by the arresting officer whether they are a citizen of the United States, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Self-reported yes or no answers are entered at registration. If the defendant is unresponsive or refuses to answer the question, that person’s citizenship will be marked as unknown, according to Jason Spencer, spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office.
Over 14% of all people charged since 2015 did not have their citizenship listed at the time of the public records request in January of this year and are not included in this analysis. The Landing consulted with five experts in criminal justice data and analysis, who said that assumptions can’t be made about the citizenship status of the unknown category.
How we did this
The Houston Landing received this publicly available data through a public information records request through the Harris County District Clerk’s Office. It includes all criminal charges filed in Harris County from Jan. 1, 2015 to Dec. 31, 2024. The dataset includes a category for citizenship of each person. It is updated as of January of this year to reflect the current citizenship or charge of each person as of January 2025.
Charge rates were calculated using 5-year American Community Survey adult population estimates collected by the U.S. Census Bureau broken down by sex, age, nativity, and citizenship status. The database was filtered to include individuals who were 18 years or older at the time of charge.
The Landing shared its methodology with 5 experts, including data journalism and criminal justice researchers from the Marshall Project, Cato Institute, Kinder Institute of Urban Research, Rice University. They reviewed the findings and provided feedback on the analysis. All agreed that the Landing’s methodology is consistent with standards for criminal justice data analysis.
The data analyzed by the Landing is of pre-trial charges, meaning documentation of the accusation of a crime, not the outcome of a case. The data collected does not include immigration status, so non-citizens can include both documented and undocumented immigrants.
Both HPD and the Sheriff’s Office, the two largest law enforcement agencies in the county, declined to comment on the findings of the analysis.
“HPD encourages everyone who has been a crime victim or a witness to report,” said HPD spokesperson Jodi Silva. “Our focus is on criminals who are harming Houstonians and ensuring everyone remains safe.”
But overall, the Landing’s finding that citizens are charged with crimes at higher rates than noncitizens is consistent with past studies on immigration and crime. In Texas, the arrest rate for immigrants is between 44 and 53 percent lower than for native-born citizens depending on immigration status, according to the Cato Institute.
A nationwide study of incarceration rates published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated. Over the 150 years of the study, immigrants were never incarcerated at a higher rate than the U.S.-born population.
“Despite the rhetoric coming out of the White House and from other politicians, immigrants have been shown to commit crimes at similar or lower rates than U.S.-born people,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the DC-based Migration Policy Institute. “That finding has held over many different studies of many different methodologies and held over multiple years of research.”
Perception vs. reality
The most common charges in recent years among both citizens and non-citizens alike were for drunk driving and family violence. But crime data related to homicide is often the most accurate because these crimes are more likely to be reported, said Alex Nowrasteh, who has researched immigration and crime for conservative think tank the Cato Institute.
Out of 602 homicide-related charges in 2023, 3% were filed against non-citizens. The most recent population data shows that non-citizens were nearly six times less likely to be charged with an offense related to murder, homicide or manslaughter than citizens. Non-citizens have been less likely to be charged with such crimes since 2015.
Regardless of citizenship, these types of charges are not common. In Harris County, an estimated 16 adults out of every 100,000 county residents were charged with these crimes, according to 2023 population data.
Still, these cases often get the most media attention. Among the most high-profile cases was the June 2024 murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. After two Venezuelan immigrants were accused in her murder, her mother Alexis became a major part of the Trump campaign as she blamed border policy for her daughter’s death. The case also stirred a debate in Harris County about whether stricter immigration policy would deter local crime in a county that is nearly one-third foreign-born.
The overall statistics showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates don’t always offer solace to victims, said multiple experts interviewed by the Landing, adding that the hyper-focus on these shocking cases often distorts people’s perception of overall public safety.
“It is certainly easier to politicize the point and gain traction and momentum for certain policies when it comes to immigration, when you can cherry-pick a celebrated case,” said former Houston Police Department chief Charles McClelland.
“I wish that the issue would not be politicized as much as it has been by either major party,” he later said.
Linking immigrants to crime has been a common political tactic throughout U.S. history to justify limiting immigration, such as during the 1920s when a law was passed to limit immigrants allowed in the U.S., according to Gelatt of MPI. President Trump has used these arguments throughout both his administrations to justify tough immigration policies and, now, mass deportations, whether or not those arrested are actually criminals.
This rhetoric has been in full force in places such as Colony Ridge, one hour outside of Houston. Earlier this year, federal immigration and state police arrested at least 118 people in a raid following years of anti-immigrant rhetoric and false claims of widespread criminality among the development’s immigrant population. But in the days since, locals and advocates have decried arrests of people without charges or criminal records.
“We know that ICE is under tremendous pressure to increase their daily arrest numbers,” Gelatt said. “They’re trying to find the people who are easiest to arrest. Some of those people may have criminal convictions and some of them may not.”
An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that the agency could not comment on crime rates in Harris County, but said that 90% of ICE arrests in the Houston area last fiscal year were of immigrants charged with or convicted of a crime.
“The positive impact of ICE immigration enforcement efforts have bolstered public safety, national security and border security in our communities,” an ICE spokesperson said.
Boots on the ground
For those who have policed the streets of Houston and researched immigrant crime trends, it was not shocking to hear that noncitizens were less likely to have criminal charges.
While the data reviewed by the Houston Landing doesn’t specify the immigration status of noncitizens, McClelland stressed that during his time as chief, he reviewed data that showed that undocumented immigrants were also less likely to be charged with a crime. He stressed that being undocumented in the U.S. is not a criminal act.
“It’s a civil penalty, and local law enforcement don’t enforce civil penalties,” said McClelland. “Most people in the public believe that these are criminal penalties.”
Moreover, rhetoric focusing on immigration status can detract from law enforcement’s main mission and from community members’ willingness to come forward about a crime.
“Most law enforcement officers, boots on the ground, they’re chasing bad guys…they want to do something about anybody that’s committed violent crimes,” McClelland said.
Douglas Griffith, the president of the Houston Police Officers Union, agreed that “most noncitizens are hardworking individuals,” and that the citizenship status of those they interact with doesn’t factor into how HPD officers operate.
“We arrest for crimes and warrants, and we put people in jail,” he said.
The focus on immigration as a public safety issue distracts from other social problems in Houston, such as access to healthcare, food security, and disaster prevention, Murdza of ILRC said.
“There is a lot on the news and from elected officials who say that there’s some set number of people who are the dangerous people, and if we can detain them, then you will be safe,” Murdza said. “It’s just not that simple.”