The US Department of Homeland Security is trying to give President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” crusade credit for a decline in violent crime, even though the trend began well before he took office.
Linking to a report from Axios detailing the decline in violent crime across US cities over the past year, the department’s account on X wrote that “under the leadership” of Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, "violent crime is PLUNGING in cities across the country.”
“By removing criminal illegal aliens from our nation, we’re making our communities SAFE again,” it continued.
The report draws on quarterly data from 67 major US law enforcement agencies, collected by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which is often cited as a source for previewing crime trends before the annual FBI reports are released in the fall.
The first-quarter data show significant declines in crime rates from the first quarter in March 2025 that “show up across every major region, suggesting a systemic, nationwide trend,” according to Axios.
- Homicides dropped 17.7%.
- Robberies fell 20.4%.
- Rapes declined 7.2%.
- Aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%.
However, as the report acknowledges, this drop in crime is not a new phenomenon, but the continuation of “a nationwide decline that began after the pandemic-era crime spike… with drops beginning in the second half of the [Joe] Biden presidency and continuing under Trump.”
According to FBI data, homicides fell by 22.7% from January-June 2023 to January-June 2024, while robbery decreased 13.6%, rape decreased 17.7%, and aggravated assault decreased 8.1%.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called it “total BS” for DHS to give Trump credit for this past year’s drops.
“Violent crime has been dropping nationwide for three years,” he said. “Now Trump comes in and claims that magically that’s all his doing.”
Crediting Mullin in particular is especially odd, considering that he had held the role of secretary of homeland security for just over a week when the yearlong data collection period ended on March 31.
But at any rate, there’s little reason to believe that immigration enforcement bears much responsibility for the continued crime decline.
A study of incarceration data by the libertarian Cato Institute published in March found that between 2010 and 2024, the incarceration rate for undocumented immigrants was 44% lower than that of native-born US citizens, while that for legal immigrants was 75% lower.
Notably, the data includes undocumented people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for immigration-related offenses, meaning that the rate of violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants is likely even lower relative to citizens.
And while the Trump administration has claimed to target “the worst of the worst” immigrants for deportation by ICE, The Guardian found that 77% of those who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal convictions.
Nearly half of those who did had only been convicted of traffic or immigration-related offenses. Just 9% had been convicted of assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault, and just 0.5% were for homicide.
Reichlin-Melnick said: “There is no evidence at all that deportations have reduced crime rates. None. Zero.”
In fact, it’s possible that the Trump administration’s aggressive ramp-up of deportations has made it harder to fight violent crime.
In September, amid Trump’s military occupations and surges of immigration agents into cities like Chicago, Cato received records showing that more than 25,000 federal officers—including more than 2,800 with the FBI, 2,100 with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and 1,700 with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had been diverted to assist with immigration enforcement. This amounts to more than 1 in 5 FBI agents, nearly half of DEA agents, and over two-thirds of ATF agents.
The Marshall Project wrote about how this shift in priorities was taking shape:
In May, the FBI ordered its agents to scale back investigations of white-collar crime and focus on immigration instead. In Baltimore, FBI agents on the city’s domestic terrorism squad were investigating online child predators when they were ordered to work full-time on immigration enforcement, MSNBC reported. About 10 agents were reportedly reassigned from building cases against what the FBI described as a “nihilistic violent extremist” group in order to help the Department of Homeland Security arrest immigrants.
“It’s a good time to be an American-born criminal,” Jason Houser, formerly ICE’s chief of staff under Biden, told The Marshall Project at the time. “When the FBI, DEA, ATF are all doing checkpoints in [Chicago’s] Little Italy tomorrow, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the Jeffrey Epsteins, the fentanyl traffickers—they don’t quit.”
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