Ben Carson says a lot of released illegal immigrants are from Iraq, Somalia and Russia

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says the federal government has failed to secure the border and is releasing "hardened criminals" who are trying to invade the United States -- including from Iraq.

Criticism about the federal government releasing criminal illegal immigrants has been a familiar talking point during the GOP presidential primary following the murder this summer of a woman in San Francisco by a convicted felon who had previously been deported.

In a Sept. 25, 2015, speech at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, Carson said that after a trip to the Mexican border, he found that "anybody could get through there." Then he made a claim about how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement releases illegal immigrants:

"And then, you know, when they capture people, ICE tells them to release them. And a lot of those people are not from Honduras and Mexico. They’re from Iraq and Somalia and Russia. And many of them are hardened criminals. And it seems like our federal government is actually fighting against the sheriffs and the people who are down there."

Two days later, Martha Raddatz of ABC News asked Carson if he had evidence that many were hardened criminals from those countries.

Carson, a GOP presidential candidate from West Palm Beach, Fla., replied: "Well, I talked to a number of the sheriffs on the borders and they've told me what kind of people are coming over. So I'm not sure that I would trust, quite frankly, any figures coming from the government, given the fact that they are the ones who are problematic."

We decided to check whether "a lot" of illegal immigrants who are released are from Iraq, Somalia and Russia. We couldn’t find comprehensive data on the citizenship of those who are released, but within the universe of those who are apprehended, only a tiny speck are from the countries cited by Carson.

Pinal County, Arizona

Carson campaign spokesman Doug Watts told us to call Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu in Arizona.

Carson met with Babeu when he visited the Arizona-Mexico border in August. Babeu blasted the federal government for releasing three criminal illegal immigrants this summer who were from Iraq, Russia and Sudan (not Somalia, as Carson said).

That included Dennis Valerievitch Tsoukanov of Russia, who set a police informant on fire; Musa Salah Abdelaziz Abdalla of Sudan, who had been convicted of assault; and Nasser Hanna Hermez of Iraq, who had been convicted of negligent homicide in the death of his infant daughter. In all three cases, after they had finished any term of incarceration, they were turned over to ICE, which then later released the men.

ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea told PolitiFact that "ICE under current law can no longer legally hold the three individuals."

Hermez is a legal permanent resident whose conviction does not make him eligible for deportation. The other two were foreign nationals who were released based on the Supreme Court decision in Zadvydas vs. Davis. That ruling prevents ICE from indefinitely holding individuals if it’s unlikely that ICE can actually deport them. These two men were ordered to report regularly to an ICE officer.

Tim Gaffney, director of administration for the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, told PolitiFact that law enforcement had seen an increase in a group referred to as "special interest aliens" who are from 35 countries with terrorist ties, including Iraq and Somalia.

Gaffney sent PolitiFact an excerpt from a report produced by the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center and other agencies which stated that during the first 10 months of fiscal year 2014, Border Patrol apprehended 402 "special interest aliens" with more than half of them from Bangladesh. The three countries cited by Carson, however, were not included in the excerpt. (Gaffney said he couldn’t provide the whole report because it is "law-enforcement sensitive.")

We also found news articles that cited examples of illegal immigrants with ties to terrorist groups who had been caught along the border. But none of the articles we saw backed up Carson’s argument that any significant number of illegal immigrants were from Iraq, Somalia and Russia.

The most we could find were articles like one from February, in which the Houston Chronicle posted a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety that stated that it had come in contact with special interest aliens including from Somalia with terrorist ties. There were additional news articles about two different Somali men with terrorist ties accused of smuggling Somalis into the United States.

But none of these reports suggest that there are "a lot" of people from those nations.

Illegal immigrants apprehended or removed

We also looked at broader data from federal officials to gauge the frequency of aliens from the countries Carson cited.

The most comprehensive data comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. That data shows that for 2013 there were 662,483 aliens apprehended, including 169 from Iraq, 320 from Russia and 214 from Somalia. So, combined, the illegal immigrants from these countries add up to less than 1 percent of the total.

The largest groups of illegal immigrants were from Mexico (424,978), Guatemala (73,208) and Honduras (64,157).

We obtained more current data from the U.S. Border Patrol which showed the number of apprehensions by citizenship for 1.2 million deportable aliens between fiscal year 2013 and August 2015. Let’s look at the countries cited by Carson:

Total deportable aliens

Honduras

Mexico

Iraq

Russia

Somalia

Fiscal year 2013

420,789

46,865

267,734

5

32

7

Fiscal year 2014

486,651

91,475

229,178

7

30

6

Fiscal year 2015 through August

306,288

30,067

172,932

Featured Fact-check

Elon Musk

stated on November 13, 2024 in an X post

Says Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., “is trying to change the outcome of the election by counting NON-CITIZEN votes.”

7

17

1

Totals

1,213,728

168,407

669,844

17

79

14

Percent of total

13.9 %

55%

.001%

.006%

.001%

Source: U.S. Border Patrol

Still, Carson referred to the citizenship of illegal immigrants who were released by ICE, so we went in search of that data.

Illegal immigrants released

According to ICE data, the agency released 36,007 criminals in 2013 and 30,558 in 2014. The most common reason for the releases was due to a court order.

However, data on country of origin for illegal immigrants who were released was not immediately available from ICE.

We did find some efforts to fill in the blanks. Jeremy Redmon of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution documented cases in which the person’s country of origin refused to take them, which led to their release. The Journal-Constitution created a map to show 9,000 incidents of such illegal immigrants in cases between January 2012 and June 2014. He obtained the data through the federal Freedom of Information Act.

The countries that had the highest numbers of those released because their country wouldn’t take them were Cuba (2,348), Vietnam (779), Laos (465), Honduras (450), El Salvador (419), Mexico (346) and Guatemala (336).

By contrast, 47 detainees were released from Russia, 153 from Somalia and 136 from Iraq.

Of course, this is only one subset of illegal immigrants who were released; however, it is one more piece of evidence that shows certain Latin American countries have higher numbers of illegal immigrants caught here than most other nations.

Jessica M. Vaughan, an expert at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for low levels of immigration, said she has examined unpublished Border Patrol data on the citizenship of those apprehended and "noted that there are some individuals from Middle Eastern countries apprehended each year at the land border, although not a large number."

Our ruling

Carson says that when ICE releases illegal immigrants "a lot of those people are not from Honduras and Mexico. They’re from Iraq and Somalia and Russia."

Carson pointed to information from just one sheriff in Arizona, and even here he garbled the information -- the sheriff criticized the federal government for releasing three criminal illegal immigrants from Iraq, Russia and Sudan, not Somalia.

When we looked at the broad sweep of data, we saw nothing to indicate that the three countries Carson cited account for a significant share of illegal immigrants.

We rate this claim Mostly False.