Twenty-one percent of federal inmates are suspected or confirmed to be non-citizens, according to statistics released by the Justice Department Thursday.
According to the latest U.S. census, only 12.9% of the total U.S. population was foreign born.
An executive order signed by President Trump called for the federal government to release quarterly reports on incarcerated immigrants. The DOJ and Department of Homeland Security released its third report Thursday.
There are 39,455 immigrants currently in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, which amounts to 21 percent of the total population.
The average annual cost per inmate in the BOP was $30,619.85 in Fiscal Year 2014.
One senior administration official said that using sentencing data, the government determined that “non-citizens make up a disproportionate percentage of drug offenses, fraud offenses, money laundering offenses, and many others including of course immigration offenses.”
The quarterly report also found that there were an additional 19,311 known or suspected immigrants in U.S. Marshal Service custody.
Of the total 37,557 confirmed immigrants in federal custody, 94 percent are illegal immigrants.
The report does not have data on the populations in state prisons and local jails, which make up roughly 90 percent of the total American incarcerated population.
A senior administration official said he hopes to have these figures in future reports.
Liam Clancy contributed to this report