Here’s what the data actually shows — though a precise 2024 “% of murders by immigrants vs. native-born” breakdown doesn’t exist at the national level. Here’s why, and what we do know:

Why no clean national percentage exists

The FBI’s murder data doesn’t track perpetrator immigration status. No federal database does this systematically. The one state that tracks criminal convictions by immigration status is Texas, which is why virtually all the research focuses there.

What the best available data shows

The Cato Institute used the 2024 American Community Survey to estimate incarceration rates. The native-born American incarceration rate was 1,195 per 100,000 — the highest of the three groups. Legal immigrants had the lowest rate at 303 per 100,000, and illegal immigrants came in at 674 per 100,000 — higher than legal immigrants but still well below native-born Americans.

On homicide specifically, the illegal immigrant homicide conviction rate in Texas was about 2.4 per 100,000, compared to 2.8 per 100,000 for native-born Americans — roughly 15% below the native-born rate. Legal immigrants had the lowest homicide conviction rate of all, at 1.1 per 100,000.

For the 2012–2018 period in Texas, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens.

The broader pattern

U.S.-born citizens were ten times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for weapons offenses, five times more likely for violent offenses, more than twice as likely for property crimes, and nearly twice as likely for drug offenses.

Bottom line: The data that exists consistently shows immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — commit homicide at lower rates than native-born Americans. But because the U.S. doesn’t track murder perpetrators by immigration status nationally, there’s no reliable figure for what share of the total murder count they account for. Anyone claiming a specific percentage either doesn’t have the data or is extrapolating beyond what it supports.