The Chicago Police Department has made more than 1,000 arrests of Venezuelan migrants in the first three months of 2024, crime data that the Chicago Tribune published reveals.
The Tribune solely reviewed crime data of the sanctuary city’s Venezuelan population, as 40,000 have arrived since August 2022. The Chicago Police Department does not track arrests of migrants, but it does track the country of origin for those arrested, though that data is not recorded in about 14 percent of cases.
Of cases where that data was recorded, the Chicago Police Department made more than 1,000 arrests of Venezuelan migrants from January through March of 2024.
Put another way, while newly arrived Venezuelan migrants make up just 1.5 percent of Chicago’s 2.6 million residents, they have accounted for 11.11 percent of all arrests in the first three months of 2024, when officers recorded the arrestees’ country of origin.
Chicago City Councilman Raymond Lopez (D), who has advocated ending the city’s sanctuary policy and stopping the flow of illegal immigration, told the Tribune that “quality-of-life laws” are not being enforced, and crime is breaking out around migrant shelters as a result.
“Politically, we have an environment that is making excuses for those low-level offenses as something that should be forgiven or ignored without realizing that it has a very real snowball effect in our neighborhoods,” Lopez said.
Recently arrived migrants sit on cots and the floor of a makeshift shelter at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, on August 31, 2023. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
More broadly, in the 19 months since migrants started arriving in Chicago, 21 arrests were made of Venezuelan migrants for violent felonies — including the arrest of 28-year-old Elvis Hernandez-Pernalete, who was charged in March for allegedly sexually assaulting and robbing a woman he followed off a subway.
Hours before, Hernandez-Pernalete allegedly followed another woman and assaulted her in an attempt to rob her but fled when a passerby noticed what was happening.
In 2023, Chicago Police Department data showed that arrests of Venezuelan migrants had skyrocketed more than 11,000 percent since 2021.
In 2021, for example, the Chicago Police Department arrested just six Venezuelan migrants. By late November 2023, nearly 700 Venezuelans had been arrested.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
