Tennessee Stands Alone among States in Reporting on Illegal Immigrant Crime

A little noticed report out of Tennessee published earlier this year is the first by a state to list the numbers and types of crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

The 2024 state law that authorized the “2025 Immigration Report,” published on January 30 by the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference (TNDAGC), requires law enforcement to report all convictions and arrests of illegals. The law also calls for a new report each calendar year.

No other state or the federal government compiles annual statistics on illegal immigrant crime, and it’s been left to private advocacy groups to root out instances of crime that are nearly always underreported, or not reported at all, by the mainstream media, according to advocates of immigration reform.

First of Its Kind State Reporting

Restoration News publishes an ongoing report listing the number of illegal immigrant crimes by state, and Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC) has attempted for years to produce accurate crime numbers using limited, and sometimes unreliable, state and federal data.

“This is a great step, a great model,” AVIAC president Don Rosenberg said, referring to the Tennessee report. 

Rosenberg, who lost his son Drew in 2010 in San Francisco to a Honduran national driving without a license, added that accurate figures are vital to cut through the media’s years long bias in protecting illegal immigrants. 

“I’ve been following the Los Angeles Times for that past 15  years, and there have been hundreds of stories about illegals as victims, but less than a handful about crime committed by illegals,” he said. “They didn’t even cover the story of the Gorman murder.”

Sheridan Gorman, a freshman at Loyola University Chicago, was murdered in March by a Venezuelan national.

The major networks largely ignored the story, wrote Tim Graham of NewsBusters.org in a March 28 opinion piece published by Fox News. 

“The networks hate reporting on crime committed by illegal immigrants,” Graham wrote. “They would insist it’s atypical. They love to proclaim that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans—if you’re willing to dismiss the crime of entering the country illegally or overstaying a visa. But this ignores the obvious logic for grieving families like Gorman’s—if the alleged illegal alien killer hadn’t been allowed into the country, their loved one would still be alive.”

Tennessee Volunteers Transparency

The Tennessee law requires TNDAGC to collect and analyze data on the number of those here illegally charged or convicted of a crime. 

For the report covering 2025, 94 counties (of 95) filed more than 11,000 reports, totaling over 21,000 charges against those in the country illegally. 

The top charges were traffic-related, including driving without a license, DUIs, and driving with a suspended license.

About 10% (around 2,000) of the charges were for violent offenses. This included 966 reports of domestic assault, 452 reports of aggravated assault, and 31 charges related to homicide (first-degree, second-degree, or unclassified).

The TNDAGC said that the true number of crimes is likely higher than those reported.

The law that authorized the annual reports, Public Chapter 1008, requires law enforcement officers to attempt to determine whether an individual is in the country illegally. If the individual is an illegal, the officer certifies that the arrested individual could not meet any of the qualifications outlined under state law. 

“The individual is then reported as not lawfully present or unknown in accordance with the law,” the law says. 

Defending the Tennessee law to WKRN News 2, state House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) said that “what you had is porous borders through President Biden’s office, and so it’s led to increased illegal immigration into the state of Tennessee and into the county. Which has led us to have to spend a lot of resources to the tune of, I think, in the state close to almost a billion dollars of funding to combat illegal immigration.”

In most U.S. jurisdictions, especially sanctuary jurisdictions, law enforcement does not attempt to determine nationality. In fact, in most sanctuary jurisdictions officers are prohibited from even inquiring about citizenship, even though it’s a federal offense to be in the United States without documentation.

Rosenberg said that he hoped other states would adopt the Tennessee model. And he is anticipating an update to a 2018 General Accounting Office (GAO) report that analyzed data on illegals in federal and state prisons. 

A spokesman for the GAO said they anticipate publishing an update sometime this fall. 

 “Even extrapolating the Tennessee numbers by half shows the massive numbers of crimes committed by people who have no right to be here,” Rosenberg said. “It is criminal that Democratic politicians refuse to even acknowledge there’s a problem but maybe more so that most of the media refuses to report on it. Does one of their loved ones have to die at the hands of an illegal alien?”

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