In response to Mike Sigman’s letter headlined “Democrats hide immigrant crime data” (Herald, July 14), I would just like to add a few details to help understand the statistics his argument depends on. He references the 2014 Annual Report of the U.S. Sentencing Commission (which is readily available online and not at all hidden) to state in 2014, 42 percent of offenders sentenced in federal crimes were non-citizens. But the next paragraph in the report states that 81.5 percent of the offenses studied were related to drugs, immigration, firearms and fraud – mostly nonviolent crimes.

I wanted to get a clearer picture of the data, so I looked at the Sentencing Commission’s Interactive Sourcebook (again, easily accessible online), which relies on data from 2013, instead of the 2014 data in the annual report. The 2013 data is interactive and can be broken down according to race, ethnicity, type of crime and so on. When we break down the percentages according to type of crime, we see that the category with the highest percentage of non-citizen offenders is immigration offenses, which account for 67 percent of the federal crimes for which non-citizens were sentenced. In all of the categories of violent crimes, the type that Sigman mentions, we see that in the murder category, more than 90 percent of those convicted were U.S. citizens. For manslaughter, the figure is fully 100 percent U.S. citizens. In sexual assault, 93.4 percent were U.S. citizens and 100 percent in burglary.

We should also keep in mind the “non-U.S.-citizen” category the Sentencing Commission uses is not limited to undocumented individuals but includes legal permanent residents, visa holders and even foreign residents who commit financial crimes under U.S. jurisdiction without ever stepping foot on U.S. soil (this might explain large percentages of non-citizens in the fraud and antitrust categories). That is a much larger sample pool than the undocumented humans (yes, humans – not aliens) Sigman is alarmed about.

Anyone interested in coming to their own conclusions about this data may easily access it at isb.ussc.gov.

Danny Quinlan, executive director of Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center

Durango