Sixty-Three Percent of Nothing: How a 40-Year Deportation Docket Became "Last Year's Murders"

Claim: "63% of the murders last year in America" were committed by illegal immigrants. Our verdict: false (truth score 0.02, confidence 0.92).

Said at ~55:53 on Making the Argument with Nick Freitas (BlazeTV), "Britain Is Gone, and America Is Next w/ Tommy Robinson," 18 September 2026. The guest, Tommy Robinson, probably said it, but the transcript doesn't separate the speakers. It went out on the show without challenge.

We start with the strongest case for the other side. The FBI's national crime data doesn't record offenders' immigration status, so no national annual figure exists in either direction. The Center for Immigration Studies disputes the Cato Institute's reading of Texas records and puts the illegal-immigrant homicide rate at 3.9 per 100,000, about 30% above the state rate. Cato answers that the CIS data was partly double-counted. Apply even the CIS figure nationally and illegal immigrants account for roughly 4% of homicides. The real dispute is whether their share sits a little below or a little above their roughly 3–4% population share. For 63% to be true, their homicide rate would have to be about 50 times everyone else's. No dataset on any side comes close.

The number probably started as a real one. In September 2024 ICE reported 13,099 people with homicide convictions on its non-detained docket. That docket is a cumulative count reaching back about 40 years, and it includes people currently in prison and legal residents. By April 2026 a Geller Report headline had divided that figure by 20,162 "murder cases" to get 64%. We could not trace where the 20,162 came from. Five months later the number came back as "I think 63%… last year." We file this under jurisdiction laundering: a figure that is true of one time window loses the qualifier that locates it and gets presented as a general baseline. We also cover what we still don't know, including who exactly said it and where the denominator came from.