On May 22, a 26-year-old illegal alien named Michael Rosario-Cruz allegedly plowed into traffic on Interstate 40 in Oklahoma while driving under the influence. Four Americans — Kiercy Hickson, Quincy Jones, Haleigh Salazar, and Brad Palmer — died. Rosario-Cruz was arrested by the Canadian County Sheriff's Office and charged with second-degree murder.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) would like you to know that's a fake problem.
The Connecticut Democrat went on record this week declaring that migrant crime is essentially imaginary. "Nobody likes to hear this, but immigrants — first-generation immigrants — and undocumented immigrants both commit crimes at rates lower than natural-born Americans," Murphy said. He then added: "If you want to live in a safe community, you are actually better off living in a community with people that just got to the United States."
Someone tell the four families in Oklahoma.
Murphy's source is a March 2026 Cato Institute study — a libertarian think tank with a longstanding pro-immigration policy position. The study's headline finding: illegal immigrants are incarcerated at 674 per 100,000, compared to 1,195 per 100,000 for native-born Americans. That's the number Murphy is running with. What he isn't telling you is why the 674 figure can't be trusted.
The deportation problem.
The Cato study measures who is sitting in a state prison on a given day. It does not measure who commits crimes. For illegal immigrants specifically, the gap between those two things is enormous.
When illegal immigrants are arrested, they frequently don't complete the standard path through the criminal justice system. Immigration authorities routinely deport illegal aliens directly from custody — sometimes before conviction, sometimes before they finish their sentences. Half of all ICE enforcement actions involve people already incarcerated. When a criminal illegal alien gets deported instead of serving time in a state prison, he vanishes from Cato's statistics. The crime still happened. The victim still exists. But the offender no longer appears in the incarceration count being used to tell you how safe illegal immigrants are.
Every criminal illegal alien who gets deported rather than incarcerated makes the 674 figure look lower than it should be. Murphy isn't citing a study that measures criminal behavior. He's citing a study that measures who happens to be in a state prison bed when the survey runs.
The survey problem.
The Cato methodology relies on American Community Survey data, which asks prisoners to self-report their immigration status. Illegal immigrants are less likely to self-identify to federal surveyors than any other population — major research organizations including Pew formally account for this undercount in their own work. The Crime Prevention Research Center found that adjusting for these known biases can nullify or reverse Cato's conclusions entirely.
The demographics problem.
The study compares the illegal immigrant population to all native-born Americans — but those two groups don't look the same. Illegal immigrants skew heavily toward young adult males, the demographic that commits the most crime of any segment of the population, by a wide margin. The native-born comparison group includes women, children, and the elderly — all of whom commit far less crime. When you compare a group that is predominantly young adult males to a broader population that includes people who by age and sex alone commit almost no crime, you are not comparing apples to apples. Control for age and sex, and the gap Murphy is pointing to narrows considerably.
The variation problem.
The 674 overall figure also masks significant variation within the illegal immigrant population. Illegal immigrants come from dozens of countries, and crime rates differ substantially by national origin. Cato's own data shows the numbers move significantly when broken out by different immigrant populations. Using one aggregate rate to make a sweeping claim about every illegal alien regardless of where they came from overstates the precision of the argument by a wide margin.
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, addressed the core issue: "Migrants can in fact lower the crime rate, but it doesn't help anybody who got killed by illegal aliens." Even granting Murphy's number at face value, a lower per-capita rate across millions of people still produces thousands of crimes that would not have occurred if those individuals had never entered the country. Every one of those crimes has a victim who exists outside Murphy's study.
Krikorian described the mindset plainly: "The open migration people hold that view as an almost religious principle." He compared it to the old revolutionary logic — "you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet." Kiercy Hickson was one of those eggs. Brad Palmer was one. Laken Riley, killed by an illegal alien in 2024, was one.
"You know Chris Murphy doesn't have to worry about his daughter being killed by an illegal alien like Laken Riley was killed," Krikorian added.
Then there's German Oliverio Miranda-Tapia — a Paisas gang member from Mexico, previously deported on July 14, 2020, who was back in the country long enough to rack up convictions for third-degree sexual assault, risk of injury to a child, and reckless driving before DHS announced his deportation on August 26, 2026. His case doesn't appear in Cato's study. He was deported, not incarcerated in a state prison. Which is precisely the point.
This is the same senator who spent six months in 2024 crafting an immigration reform bill, then watched Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer help tank the enforcement provisions when they became politically inconvenient. Propose something that sounds responsible, strip out the teeth, then cite a think-tank study to explain why teeth were never needed.
Four families in Oklahoma are planning funerals because an illegal alien who should not have been here got behind the wheel. A gang member with a child sex assault conviction was walking American streets years after his deportation. The Department of Homeland Security is processing cases like these by the hundreds.
Sen. Murphy has the aggregate data. The families have the caskets.