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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Video: ‘Criminal Aliens’ in the U.S.


In this video, CNN’s Jake Tapper explains President-elect Donald Trump’s exaggerated claim that there are “probably 2 million” or “even 3 million” criminals living illegally in the U.S.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “estimates that 1.9 million removable criminal aliens are in the United States today,” according to a Department of Homeland Security report for fiscal year 2013. But, as the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2016 report, those “criminal aliens” include immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally who have been convicted of a crime. Less than half of those criminals — 820,000 — are here illegally, according to an estimate from the Migration Policy Institute.

This video is part of our fact-checking collaboration with CNN’s “State of the Union.” All of the videos are available on FactCheck.org.