The Government Doesn’t Understand Its Own Immigration and Crime Data

On March 6, 2017, President Trump issued Executive Order 13780.  The order was mostly concerned with reducing the number of immigrants and travelers from certain countries that his administration thought could pose a terror risk.  One portion of that Executive Order called for the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to investigate the number of terrorist threats and, little noticed at the time, “information regarding the number and types of acts of gender-based violence against women, including so-called ‘honor killings,’ in the United States by foreign nationals.” 

The DOJ-DHS released their report in January 2018 and almost everybody focused on the terrorism portion – including myself and my colleagues here at Cato.  However, thanks to a brilliant lawsuit that uncovered how shoddy the report was, it is now clear that it made an absolutely false statement about the number of foreign-born people arrested for sex offenses.  The DOJ-DHS report says:

Regarding sex offenses, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011 produced an estimate regarding the population of criminal aliens incarcerated in state prisons and local jails from fiscal years 2003 through 2009. In that report, GAO estimated that over that period, aliens were convicted for 69,929 sex offenses—which, although not explicitly stated in the report, in most instances constitutes gender-based violence against women.

The DOJ-DHS authors of the report made two errors that others have made in interpreting that exact GAO report, many of whom I’ve criticized. 

First, 69,929 is the number of arrests for sex offenses where the arrestees were criminal aliens, not the number of sex offenses for which criminal aliens were convicted as the DOJ-DHSclaimed.

Second, those arrests occurred from 1955 through 2010, not from 2003 through 2009.

At least the DOJ-DHS have admitted they misinterpreted the GAO report – further vindication that Peter Kirsanow made numerous errors when he was given three full minutes to monologue on it last August on the Tucker Carlson Show.  Kirsanow wouldn’t appear with me on the show after that segment to debate me – I’ll let you guess the reason why.

The biggest problem here isn’t that the DOJ-DHS authors of that report didn’t read the fine print, although that is worrying, or that they likely let their political bias cloud their research findings.  The biggest problem here is that the GAO report misleads more than it illuminates and provides a legitimate looking citation for erroneous claims that are difficult to check.  The GAO is a more professional and less political department than the DOJ or DHS, at least when it comes to investigating and publishing the results of empirical research.  The GAO should retract the report and the later 2018 version that have both been so misinterpreted, rewrite them so that they are crystal clear, re-release them with a list of corrections from the previous editions, and include an FAQ section with answers.   If current government bureaucrats at the DOJ and DHS as well as former bureaucrats like Peter Kirsanow have trouble understanding the GAO report, then clearly the GAO needs to fix the problem and try to prevent it from occurring in the future.  Otherwise, what is the point of the GAO?