Lawyers for victims of illegal alien crime on spike in arrests of foreigners: ‘If you’re willing to break the law by entering the country illegally, you’re also willing to break other laws’

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has arrested record numbers of people born in Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia in recent years, according to an analysis of CPD arrest records by James Bosco of the Chicago Contrarian. This is while arrest rates for people born in the U.S., or for people born in other foreign countries such as Puerto Rico and Mexico, have remained largely unchanged.

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

Overall, Chicago arrests continued to decline in 2021, falling below 75,000. But since 2021, the total number of arrests has slowly increased, with the CPD making 91,652 arrests in 2023, Bosco reported.

“The arrest numbers come as no surprise,” Don Rosenberg, president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, told Chicago City Wire when asked to comment on the CPD figures. “If you’re willing to break the law by coming into the country illegally, you’re willing to break other laws.”

“Most of them are poorly screened,” he added, “if they are screened at all. And they come to a city that does not 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 alien without a license.

In a July report on the challenges of handling a growing migrant population, WBEZ reported that most of the 30,000 migrants who have arrived through the southern border in the past two years have come from Venezuela.

While Chicago was not specifically mentioned, a recent Fox News Digital report cited a Treasury Department statement saying members of a violent Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua, have entered the U.S.

Treasury called the gang “a transnational criminal organization engaged in crimes ranging from human trafficking to kidnapping, extortion, money laundering and illegal drug trafficking.”

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas told Fox the gang was like “MS-13 on steroids,” and said members have been coming to the United States for a number of years.

“They’re extremely aggressive,” he said. “It’s not that they’re a passive group or that they’re going to go about their business quietly. They come from Venezuela, one of the most war-torn countries of the last decade. So they’re battle-hardened in many ways. And they’ve made this journey from there to here. But they’re also becoming … more organized and more brutal.”

In Chicago, Colombia contributed 0.24 percent of foreign-born arrests in 2014. Today, the total is 2.25 percent. Bosco said the most dramatic change is in Venezuela, which had less than 0.1 percent of foreign-born arrests in 2014, while that number is now nearly 23 percent.

“It is certainly true that the majority of CPD arrests are people born in the United States,” Bosco wrote. “This makes perfect sense, of course, since they represent the vast majority of people living in Chicago. However, if this trend continues, it appears that this year will be the first year in which foreigners make up more than a third of those arrested. That is quite a milestone.”