Lies, damn lies, and statistics on criminal illegal aliens

 by Andrea Widburg

We all know the expression “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” We also know about “garbage in; garbage out.” I kept thinking of those phrases when I read that an organization called “Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse” (“TRAC”), the “gold standard” for information about immigrants, deportations, and crime, quietly changed its methods when Trump returned to office. This was not an insignificant change. The result is that it looks as if Trump, rather than deporting “criminal” illegal aliens, is just engaged in racist deportation policies against immigrants.

In 1989, Syracuse University began the TRAC program. Ostensibly (and I’m getting this from Wikipedia), TRAC is “nonpartisan.” TRAC describes its purpose this way:

The purpose of TRAC is to provide the American people — and institutions of oversight such as Congress, news organizations, public interest groups, businesses, scholars, and lawyers — with comprehensive information about staffing, spending, and enforcement activities of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, what are the agencies and prosecutors actually doing? Who are their employees and what are they paid? What do agency actions indicate about the priorities and practices of government? How do the activities of an agency or prosecutor in one community compare with those in a neighboring one or the nation as a whole? How have these activities changed over time? How does the record of one administration compare with the next? When the head of an agency or a district administrator changed, were there observable differences in actual enforcement priorities? When a new law was enacted or amended, what impact did it have on agency activities?

Specifically on the subject of immigration, TRAC explains,

And still another area, TRAC-Immigration, deals in depth with how our nation’s immigration laws are enforced in administrative and criminal courts by a wide variety of agencies. Reports include records of individual judges. A reference library containing government immigration studies and a glossary are also maintained.

You can see how TRAC specifically handles immigration reporting here.

Significantly, writes Wikipedia, “Over the years, TRAC has been cited in hundreds of news articles.” Because of its academic, nonpartisan bona fides, you’re supposed to be able to trust TRAC.

As for me, I distrust anything that comes out of academia today. When it comes to Syracuse, while there does not seem to be specific data on its faculty donations to political parties, anecdotal evidence suggests that the faculty is as left-leaning as the rest of American academia (except for Hillsdale and Liberty U). Seventeen years ago, an essay claimed that “Liberal bias runs rampant at the Syracuse University campus, even in places you wouldn’t expect.”

It’s doubtful that it’s gotten better in the Trump era. After all, its alumni include Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul, Donna Shalala, and Aaron Sorkin.

That’s the background for this report from Just The News about TRAC’s subtle change to its analysis about criminal deportations:

The nation’s main independent database for tracking deportation statistics and which is widely cited by media outlets and fact-checkers appears to have recently shifted from tracking detainees with a “criminal record” to “criminal convictions.”

This new classification, which was also adopted by another standard immigration tracking database, provides figures widely cited by media and fact-checkers to suggest the Trump administration is detaining large numbers of illegal immigrants not suspected of breaking additional laws.

Since President Donald Trump took office last year, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, changed how it analyzed immigration enforcement data, to emphasize criminal convictions rather than criminal records, which can include arrests that never result in convictions.

The effect of this new approach to analysis is significant. It allows TRAC to insist that, of the more than 68,000 individuals in ICE custody, almost 74% have no criminal convictions. (All presumably are here illegally, which is a good enough reason to deport them.)

While the point about convictions is technically true, Just The News adds that, in addition to the 26% who already have criminal convictions, 26% have also been criminally charged. Of course, a charge is not the same as a conviction, but the fact that these people are entangled in our criminal justice system (often repeatedly) is significant, useful information.

I’ll end as I began: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. And garbage in; garbage out. To be very clear, what TRAC is doing is neither criminal nor civil fraud. However, the way I see it, it is information manipulation to change public policy by affecting public perceptions. The pipeline from academia to media to political decision-making is utterly corrupt and intended to break America.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/lies_damn_lies_and_statistics_on_criminal_illegal_aliens.html