Chicago City Wire

Chicago police (CPD) have arrested those born in Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia in record numbers over the past few years, according to a breakdown of CPD arrest figures by James Bosco of the Chicago Contrarian. This, while arrest rates of those American born, or those born in other foreign countries like Puerto Rico and Mexico have remained mostly unchanged.

“A trend that continued, the rate of foreign-born arrestees rose to 18.7 percent in 2022, and in 2023, it continued to rise steadily to 24.9 percent,” Bosco reported. “Through July of this year, it is running at 31.9 percent. In sum, over the last three-year period, the rate at which CPD arrests foreign-born individuals has nearly tripled.”

Overall, arrests in Chicago continued to drop in 2021 with fewer than 75,000. But since 2021, the total number of arrests has slowly risen, with CPD arresting 91,652 in 2023, Bosco reported.

“The arrests numbers come as no surprise,” Don Rosenberg, president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, told Chicago City Wire when asked to react to the CPD figures. “If you are willing to break the law by entering the country illegally, you are willing to break other laws.”

“Most of them are poorly vetted,” he added, “if they’re vetted at all. And they are coming to a city that doesn’t report its illegal immigration to the authorities.”

In 2010, Rosenberg’s son, Drew, a law student in San Francisco, was killed when his motorcycle was struck by a car driven by an illegal with no driver’s license.

In a July report covering the difficulty caring for a surging migrant population, WBEZ reported that most of the 30,000 migrants that have arrived from the southern border over the past two years are from Venezuela.

Though not mentioning Chicago specifically, a recent Fox News Digital report cited a statement from the Treasury Department that said members of a violent Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua, have been infiltrating the U.S.

Treasury called the gang “a transnational criminal organization that it engages in crime ranging from human trafficking to kidnapping to extortion, money laundering and illicit drug trafficking.”

Republican Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales told Fox that the gang was like "MS-13 on steroids," saying members have been coming to the United States for several years now.”

"They're extremely aggressive,” he said. “It's not as if they're a passive group or they want to quietly go about things. They're coming from Venezuela, one of the most war-torn countries over the last decade. So, they're battle-hardened in many ways. And they've made this trek from there to here. But they are also becoming … more organized and more brazen."

In Chicago, Colombia contributed to 0.24 percent of foreign arrests in 2014. Today, the total rests at 2.25 percent. Bosco said that the most dramatic change is with Venezuela, which accounted for less than 0.1 percent of foreign-born individuals in 2014, whereas today that number is nearly 23 percent.

“It is certainly true that the majority of arrests made by CPD are of people born in the United States,” Bosco wrote. “This, obviously, makes perfect sense because they represent the vast majority of the people living within Chicago. However, if this trend continues, it appears that this year will be the first year in which foreign-born individuals will account for over one-third of people arrested. That is quite a milestone.”