After the police said an undocumented immigrant killed an NFL linebacker in a drunken-driving accident, President Trump used the case to push his immigration agenda.
The driver was drunk, the police said, his blood alcohol content nearly three times the legal limit. One of his victims was a N.F.L. linebacker who was just reaching his prime.
But on Tuesday, two days after the crash, it was the driver’s immigration status that moved President Trump to post his first tweet of the morning.
Decades of research have shown that immigrants are less prone to commit crimes and to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. But more and more lately, Mr. Trump has been using individual criminal cases to advance an argument that illegal immigration, as well as many forms of legal immigration, is dangerous to Americans, and must be curbed.
Now the White House, along with some Republicans in Congress, is arguing that any deal to protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation must include provisions to tighten border security and roll back some types of legal immigration.
Here’s how a linebacker’s death became part of that debate.
Edwin Jackson, a linebacker from Atlanta, was the Colts’ third-leading tackler of the 2016 season before sitting out 2017 with an injury. He was riding in an Uber car driven by the crash’s second victim, Jeffrey Monroe, who was from nearby Avon, Ind.
The car had stopped along the side of Interstate 70 in Indianapolis so Mr. Monroe could get out to help Mr. Jackson, who was sick, when Manuel Orrego-Savala’s Ford truck drove onto the emergency shoulder and plowed into them, the Indiana State Police said. He struck both men, heaving one of their bodies into the highway’s center lane.
When a state trooper saw the wreckage on the side of the road shortly after, he headed toward the crash, hitting the man lying in the middle of the highway in the process, the police said. (The police did not say which man the trooper struck.)
Mr. Monroe, 54, and Mr. Jackson, 26, were pronounced dead at the scene. Mr. Orrego-Savala was arrested as he tried to flee on foot.
The state police said that Mr. Orrego-Savala was living in the United States illegally, having been deported to Guatemala twice before. He had been convicted of driving under the influence in California in 2005, and his record also showed “many other” misdemeanor convictions and arrests in Indiana and California, said Nicole Alberico, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal immigration agency.
ICE has formally asked the county jail where Mr. Orrego-Savala, who was using the alias Alex Cabrera Gonsales, is being held to continue detaining him for federal immigration agents. But he is likely to be prosecuted first for causing the fatal crash, and federal prosecutors may also seek to charge him with illegally re-entering the country after being deported.
The Trump administration regularly highlights crimes committed by immigrants, especially those who came here in ways Mr. Trump has vowed to curtail. Last week, Mr. Trump used the biggest stage available — the State of the Union address — to warn of the dangers of MS-13, a gang associated with young Central American migrants, drawing criticism that he had, once again, made immigrants out to be little more than criminals.
Besides a border wall and other measures to discourage illegal immigration, the president wants to curb two forms of legal immigration. He wants to end the diversity visa lottery, which offers people from countries that do not normally send large numbers of immigrants to the United States a chance at a green card, regardless of whether they have special skills or relatives in the United States. The president also wants to restrict family-based immigration, the system that has given millions of visas to relatives of American citizens and permanent residents, in favor of a more merit-based system.
In January, the administration released a report purporting to show that the vast majority of people convicted of international terrorism-related charges since Sept. 11,2001, were foreign-born. It took pains to highlight cases in which such people came to the country through the diversity visa lottery or because they were related to an American citizen or legal resident. But parts of the report were misleading, and Democrats and others who support immigration were quick to dismiss it for its political tinge.
Last week, in a news release that began with the words, “Our current immigration system jeopardizes our national security and puts American communities at risk,” the White House listed 15 people accused or convicted of terrorism-related crimes who it said had arrived either through the diversity visa lottery or family ties.
The list included two others whose immigration records Mr. Trump amplified on Twitter: Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi-born immigrant who tried to detonate a pipe bomb in the New York subway in December, and Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan who killed eight people in a bike lane on the West Side of Manhattan in October.
Several studies, conducted over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States, and much less likely to be in prison than those born in the United States.
Homeland Security officials have estimated that about 1.9 million noncitizens living in the country, whether legally or illegally, have been convicted of criminal offenses. About 820,000 of those people may be in the country illegally, including about 300,000 with felony convictions, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a research group that has opposed Mr. Trump’s proposals to cut immigration.
Experts say the evidence does not show that immigrants are more dangerous than native-born Americans. Among men ages 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States, according to census data, though that proportion rises significantly when only federal inmates are counted. Yet about one-third of noncitizen federal inmates are serving time only for immigration-related offenses, such as slipping back into the country after being deported.
But for those who support restricting immigration, another question is whether current immigration laws leave the country vulnerable. Opponents of the diversity visa lottery often cite a report the State Department’s inspector general issued in 2003, which concluded that the program could be granting green cards to spies, criminals and terrorists.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump often told the stories of family members of people killed by unauthorized immigrants, who argue that their relatives would still be alive if immigrants were not allowed to come illegally to the United States in the first place.
