The Problem With Trump’s Crime Claims
· The Atlantic
President Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.
“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.
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ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)
Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.
Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to federal data analyzed by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. But FBI and census data rank Georgia 33rd in the violent-crime-rate reduction. Virginia, which has also consistently been in the top 10 for ICE arrests over the past year, is 34th among states in falling violent-crime rates. And although Florida consistently has had the second- or third-highest number of monthly ICE arrests over the past year, it was 18th among states for its violent-crime-rate drop.
To be sure, there are cities with relatively high numbers of ICE arrests that have reported significant declines in violent crime, including Houston, Memphis, and Nashville. But the most recent federal data do not show cause and effect, let alone a clear correlation. In New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles—all sanctuary cities—the murder rate is the lowest in at least a half century.
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The Department of Homeland Security told us that a comparison of state-level ICE-arrest volumes and year-over-year violent-crime-count changes is improper, but did not provide evidence for the president’s own cause-and-effect claims tying the two together. “It’s common sense: when you remove illegal aliens off our streets, the violent U.S. crime rate DROPS,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “President Trump is making America safe again.”
The number of homicides and other violent crimes began falling in the 1990s. It spiked during the pandemic, then resumed a downward path during Joe Biden’s presidency. Elisa Jácome, an economist at Northwestern University who has studied the effects of immigration enforcement on crime, told us that although it’s easy for politicians to try to claim credit for the reduction, “it’s actually quite difficult to separate those claims from the underlying trends, which are very real.”
The declining violent-crime trend is also real in countries where Trump is not president and there’s no mass-deportation campaign. Canada’s homicide rate fell 16 percent from 2024 to 2025, the biggest one-year drop in 40 years, according to a July 2026 report by the Canadian government. Homicides in England and Wales are at a nearly 50-year low, according to British government data, amid a historic influx of immigrants.
Trump’s claims about crime and immigrants have been his calling card ever since he first ran for office, more than a decade ago. As his party potentially faces the loss of its congressional majority in November, he and top law-enforcement officials have been trying to fire up the MAGA faithful with the messaging that helped Republicans gain control of the House in the 2022 midterms.
The president made his law-and-order pitch during a visit in August to a police academy on Long Island, where he campaigned for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is expected to easily win the race. Using rows of uniformed police officers and cadets as a backdrop, Trump mocked the state’s Democratic leaders and told the crowd the White House was full of “young, beautiful girls” who “want to be safe” while working in the nation’s capital.
Republicans in tight races have been less eager to embrace Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican whose Miami district has been roiled by immigration enforcement, released a video message last month telling Trump that ICE was picking up too many non-criminals. Other Republicans who have tried to distance themselves from the White House’s aggressive approach include Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, where ICE has been raiding meatpacking plants. Trump won the state by 16 percentage points in 2024, but the latest polls show Marshall in a tight race with the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton, who says families are “living in fear” of ICE.
Even longtime proponents of the president’s immigration agenda have rescinded their support. In 2017, then-Governor of Maine Paul LePage applauded Trump for signing an executive order banning immigrants from many Muslim-majority countries, saying he was in full support of Trump’s “action to protect all Americans.” But last week, LePage, who is now running for a House seat, announced at a news conference that his son’s father-in-law is being deported. Even though he came to the United States legally and has a work permit, “he came from a country that’s not the liking to certain people in Washington,” LePage said, without naming the country. “That’s not right.”
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Administration officials have claimed that upwards of 65 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE have a criminal record. But even among those with convictions or pending charges, most offenses are nonviolent, Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, told us. (In July, less than 4 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE had a past violent-crime conviction, according to an analysis by The New York Times.) In August, Kubrin released a study on changing crime rates and unauthorized-immigrant populations across nearly 12,000 U.S. neighborhoods. She found that the number of immigrants in a neighborhood is inconsequential to the amount of unlawful activity. “Increases do not cause violent crime to go up. Decreases do not cause violent crimes to go down,” she said. “It has no effect.” Those findings are consistent with dozens of other studies showing that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans.
Trump officials have dismissed those arguments, advancing something akin to a broken-windows theory that claims permissive border policies encourage immigrants to disregard American laws. Having violated the country’s immigration rules to enter, the theory goes, they’re more inclined to commit more serious offenses once they settle into their new lives. Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, told us there’s no evidence of that. Lehman said criminal-justice scholars debate why the homicide rate has fallen so fast. They point to an array of other factors, including more powerful police surveillance and tracking tools that help cities more effectively deploy officers to areas with higher incidences of violent crime. Others posit more esoteric theories, such as the removal of lead from drinking water and fewer people consuming alcohol. Researchers generally don’t regard immigration enforcement as a significant factor, Lehman said.
When immigration-enforcement officers target serious criminals, however, there are potential benefits to public safety, he said, because a small fraction of offenders commit the majority of offenses. “Some of those offenders are noncitizens who are here illegally. If you remove them from the country, then mechanically you would expect the rate of violence or of serious crime to go down,” he said.
Trump has employed a version of that logic, often claiming that 2 percent of people commit 91 percent of crimes when discussing his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. (The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the National Guard had no significant impact on Washington’s decline in violent crime, but its deployment in high-visibility areas may have deterred people from committing opportunistic property offenses.) A few days after the president declared a “crime emergency” in the capital last year, Stephen Miller told reporters that “the highest degree of national-security and public-safety concern are in sanctuary cities.” Those places, Miller said, release undocumented immigrants who commit crimes back into the community, rather than turn them over to ICE. “And in many cases, those aliens will go on to commit additional serious offenses, including oftentimes—as we’ve seen over and over again—rape and murder.”
FBI and census data from the past year show that neither states with sanctuary cities nor those with high immigrant populations have the highest reported incidence of sexual assault. The five states with the highest reports of rape per capita are Alaska, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana. Each has a relatively low immigrant population, formalized cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, and a Republican in the governor’s office.
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Recent polling shows that Republicans have lost their long-held advantage over Democrats on the handling of immigration, and other polls show Democrats making up ground on crime. But voters side with Republicans on those key issues more than they do on the economy or health care, and the Trump administration has been eager to highlight them, often at the same time.
Attorney General Todd Blanche held an event at the Department of Justice last Thursday and promised to continue the administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who joined Blanche alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, urged criminal charges against officials running sanctuary cities. (Blanche might have difficulty finding a charge: Sanctuary policies don’t violate criminal statutes.) That afternoon, DOJ announced $25 million in grants for local law-enforcement agencies. But the eligibility requirements come with a catch: Funds are available only to jurisdictions that sign agreements to help ICE make more arrests.