The Illegal Immigration Myth

Some say undocumented immigrants commit as much as 25 percent of U.S. murders and wreck the economy and healthcare system. The truth is nowhere close to that.

Thirty more people died in mass shootings in Texas and Ohio in less than a 24-hour span on August 3 and 4.

That makes 251 mass shootings so far this year — about one a day, according to Gun Violence Archive.

Donald Trump and many of his followers believe illegal immigrants have carried out a significant number of these shootings. U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican from California and strong Trump supporter, is among those who have falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants killed as many as 1,800 Americans in 2017 alone.

But the truth is that unauthorized immigrants have committed exactly zero of the mass shootings listed by GVA in 2019. U.S. citizens — many of them Caucasians enraged by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, as the suspect in the El Paso shooting reportedly was — have been the perpetrators. That continues a trend of 2018, in which the Anti-Defamation League found that each of the 17 major mass killings that year — from Parkland, Fla., to Pittsburgh — could be linked to right-wing extremism.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the only major mass shooting in recent years linked to the left wing was carried out by a reported Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017.