Democrats and open borders organizations such as the CATO Institute think that only illegal aliens who have been convicted of crime should be deported, and even many times they don’t think that those individuals should be deported. The media often follows this lead and usually only counts illegal aliens as having a criminal history if they have been convicted of a crime.
David Bier, the Director of Immigration Studies at the CATO Institute, claims: “Criminal history points for the sentencing commission come from ‘prior sentences’ not arrests.” Regarding the Sentencing Commission, Bier’s statement leaves out an important part of the guidelines. An arrest alone couldn’t justify a harsher sentence, but the guidelines expressly allowed judges to consider reliable evidence of criminal conduct that never resulted in a conviction. In practice, past arrests are often necessary to produce the police reports, witness statements and other evidence that allow a judge to evaluate that very conduct.
The notion of whether someone has a criminal history isn’t just limited to whether what is considered in sentencing. Police criminal-history records in determining who might be a suspect in a crime and these criminal histories generally include arrests even when the arrest did not result in a conviction. The FBI states that an Identity History Summary—commonly called a criminal-history record or “rap sheet”—includes:
- Arrest information
- Charges
- Dispositions, such as conviction, acquittal, dismissal, or a pending case
The Justice Department’s own guide explains that each “arrest cycle” identifies the date, arresting agency, and arrest charges. If available, the record then lists the eventual disposition. It even provides an example containing pending bank-robbery charges for which no disposition yet existed. See the FBI’s Arrest Dispositions guidance and DOJ’s guide to reading an Identity History Summary.
Of course, it is obvious that organizations like CATO and the Brennan Center, support sanctuary jurisdictions who refuse to turn over convicted illegal aliens for deportation. They strongly oppose withholding federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to honor ICE detainer requests for illegals arrested or convicted of crimes.
In addition, the criminal histories have another problem: they very rarely include these illegal aliens’ convictions in their home countries. “Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said.
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