The GOP convention claims that “thanks to Joe Biden,” “unvetted illegal aliens… terrorize everyday Americans.” A joint Trump campaign/RNC press release describes the theme for Tuesday, “Make America Safe Once Again,” as follows: “Once iconic American cities and communities have become hollowed out, dystopian nightmares thanks to Joe Biden and Democrats’ ‘woke’ soft-on-crime and open border policies. In Joe Biden’s America, unvetted illegal aliens and deranged criminals are free to roam the streets and terrorize everyday Americans, all while law enforcement is demonized. Cartels have overrun our border, flooding our neighborhoods with enough deadly fentanyl and methamphetamine to kill every American multiple times over. President Donald J. Trump will stand up for our law enforcement and put an end to the senseless crime spree and drug flow that plague America.” [WisPolitics.com, 7/8/24]  

Rants about the threats posed by immigrants are a fixture of Trump’s public statements. The former president claims to have personally invented the term “migrant crime” and has made warnings about it a fixture of his public remarks and interviews. “We're going to have a new form of crime and it's called Biden migrant crime, and that's — it's a new category, and it's a very serious category, and it might blow all of our crime out the window,” Trump said during a July 8 interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. [The Washington Post, 2/26/24; ABC News, 2/29/24; Fox News, Hannity, 7/8/24]

Fox ran at least 998 weekday segments featuring discussions of violent “migrant crime” from the first of the year through July 12. That’s an average of more than 7 “migrant crime” segments per weekday. 

Fox’s “migrant crime” coverage revolves around horrific anecdotes in which migrants are the alleged perpetrators of violent crimes. The network scours the country for such cases. The biggest spikes in segments came in late February, as Fox devoted substantial attention to an undocumented Venezuelan man who allegedly killed Georgia student Laken Riley, and in June, when much of the coverage revolved around a Salvadoran migrant who allegedly killed Maryland mother Rachel Morin (the right’s claims about the latter case “implode under scrutiny,” The New Republic’s Greg Sargent noted). [Media Matters, 3/13/24, 6/25/24]

Fox’s daytime programming — including purported “straight news” shows like the ones anchored by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum — provides the bulk of the network’s “migrant crime” coverage. Fox’s morning show Fox & Friends, which runs three hours, produced the most segments with 210. “News” shows fill the next six spots on the leaderboard, including America’s Newsroom (two-hour runtime, 160 segments), America Reports (also two hours, 118 segments), Fox News @ Night (106 segments), The Faulkner Focus (79), The Story with Martha MacCallum (65), and Special Report with Bret Baier (52). Fox’s evening “opinion” shows, meanwhile, feature some of the most repugnant commentary about migrants and explicit claims that Biden is responsible for murders individual migrants allegedly committed. The Ingraham Angle ran 38 segments, Hannity contributed 34, The Five produced 31, and Jesse Watters Primetime, 30.  

Highlighting individual crimes allegedly committed by migrants is part of Fox’s strategy to elect Trump. “Every single act of violence perpetrated by an illegal immigrant between now and [the election], expect it to be a headline, it is Joe Biden's Achilles heel,” Trumpist radio host Hugh Hewitt explained on Special Report in February. Baier responded by highlighting “the recent headlines that we have seen just in the past few days about these heinous crimes allegedly at the hands of illegal immigrants.” [Media Matters, 2/29/24]

Fox spends dramatically more time discussing “migrant crime” than CNN or MSNBC. [Media Matters, 6/25/24]

This section is adapted from our previous study on the subject.

While it is notoriously difficult to draw timely and insightful conclusions from available crime statistics — and data involving migrant offenders is even more limited — the story Trump and Fox are peddling doesn’t hold up. Here’s why:

Studies show that immigrants commit crimes, including violent crimes like homicide, at lower rates than native-born Americans. Moreover, available data “indicates that a relatively small percentage of undocumented immigrants have committed crimes (excluding the fact that they are in the country without authorization)” and also suggests undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than either native-born Americans or legal immigrants. [USA Today, 3/1/24; The Washington Post, 2/29/24] 

Violent crime plummeted in 2023 and the first half of 2024, continuing the downward trajectory from its recent peak under Trump’s presidency in 2020. Nearly every type of crime assessed by the FBI fell in 2023, with murder doing so “likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded,” according to the crime analyst Jeff Asher. He added, “The quarterly data in particular suggests 2023 featured one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the United States in more than 50 years.” Asher subsequently reported gathering data from 190 U.S. cities through late May and found that “in that group of cities, murder is down around 19 percent, violent crime is down 7 percent, and property crime is down over 10 percent compared to 2023.” [Substack, 12/11/23, 7/8/24]

There is no evidence of a “migrant crime wave” sweeping the country this year. In fact, amid Fox’s February spike in “migrant crime” coverage, NBC News reported that its “review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ ‘Operation Lone Star,’ which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.” [The New York Times, 2/18/24; NBC News, 2/29/24]

The standard Fox/Trump narrative that Biden is deliberately allowing migrants into the country for sinister purposes is wrong. Biden’s administration actually “removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years ... despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings” as David J. Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute noted — but many more migrants are trying to cross into the United States without sufficient legal avenues to do so, and operational capacity to detain and deport them is limited. Moreover, illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged by 54% from December to May, according to internal government data. [Media Matters, 1/25/24; CBS News, 5/23/24]

Republicans killed a bipartisan, Biden-backed bill that would have provided increased resources to build the operational capacity to detain and deport more migrants. They did so explicitly because Trump wants to use border chaos to boost his campaign and opposed the legislation — while Fox hosts helped out by lying about the legislation and attacking its GOP supporters. [Media Matters, 2/12/24, 2/6/24, 2/7/24]

Fox stars explicitly blame Biden for crimes allegedly committed by migrants. They have alleged that “there is a migrant crime spree killing Americans and the president is an accessory to murder” (Jesse Watters) ; suggested that “women and children are being brutalized by illegal aliens all over the United States” due to “Biden’s open border” (Laura Ingraham); claimed that “Joe Biden has blood on his hands” due to “heinous crimes allegedly committed by illegal immigrants” (Sean Hannity); and described an alleged perpetrator as “one of Biden’s migrants” who is participating in an “international crime spree” (Watters again). Fox anchors and reporters have also disparaged Biden for pointing out that crime rates have declined. [Media Matters, 2/29/24, 6/25/24]

Fox encourages viewers to treat all migrants as potential killers, thieves, and terrorists. Co-host Jeanine Pirro has argued that the “presumption” for all undocumented immigrants should be that they are pedophiles and murderers, while Watters claimed that “Migrants are turning their children into little bandits -- banditos -- sending them into stores to steal food and clothes.” Fox guests have described migrants as “bioweapons deployed against America” who are “being dumped into this country by the millions as they rape and pillage and murder.” [Media Matters, 6/25/24; Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/17/24; Fox News, America's Newsroom, 6/25/24]

“Migrant crime” is only a fraction of Fox’s vile, xenophobic coverage. Over the first six months of the year, Fox hosts, personalities and guests pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory popularized by white nationalists; baselessly blamed migrants for U.S. outbreaks of measles and plague; and even turned a single TikTok video — in which the creator explains in Spanish how to expropriate an uninhabited residence — into a weeklong freakout about how how viewers “might have to worry about losing your home” to migrants Biden had allowed to “break into the country and then break into your bedroom.” [Media Matters, 2/9/24, 2/27/24, 2/27/24, 3/26/24]

Media Matters searched our internal database of all original, weekday programming on Fox News Channel (shows airing from 6 a.m. through midnight ET) for segments that analysts determined to be about immigration and crime, from January 1, 2024, through July 12, 2024.

We included segments, which we defined as instances when migrant crime was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of migrant crime. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed immigration with one another.

We did not include mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned migrant crime without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, or teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about migrant crime scheduled to air later in the broadcast.