A brand new report by the Council on Felony Justice (CCJ) discovered that homicides are considerably down in main cities throughout the nation in comparison with final 12 months, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is a part of the explanation.
“HOMICIDES DOWN 17% throughout 30 U.S. cities beneath President [Donald] Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem],” the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) posted on X Monday. “The fast arrests and deportations of prison unlawful aliens are having actual impression on public security.”
????HOMICIDES DOWN 17% throughout 30 U.S. cities beneath President Trump and @Sec_Noem.
The fast arrests and deportations of prison unlawful aliens are having actual impression on public security.
Try these stats: pic.twitter.com/oW6c7NwBeF
— Homeland Safety (@DHSgov) July 28, 2025
In a Fox News op-ed printed Monday, Brett Tolman, the chief director of Proper on Crime, a conservative-leaning prison justice advocacy group, and Ja’Ron Okay. Smith, a White Home particular assistant, additionally explicitly tied the CCJ report’s numbers to Trump’s immigration insurance policies.
Tolman and Smith write that “what the report does not say out loud is that the timing isn’t any coincidence.”
“President Donald Trump is solely imposing immigration legal guidelines already on the books—proof that we do not want extra legal guidelines; we simply want leaders with the spine to implement the legal guidelines we have now,” Tolman and Smith continued. “The outcomes are plain: communities nationwide are seeing tangible enhancements in public security.”
First, one should start by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection marketing campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking despite the fact that it had been usually dropping since 2022.
“Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Below Kamala Harris,” the Trump marketing campaign falsely declared final August.
At an October presidential debate, Trump once more claimed, “crime on this nation is thru the roof.” When a debate moderator instructed Trump that preliminary FBI information confirmed a steep drop in violent crime in 2024, Trump, as is his behavior, known as the numbers pretend.
“They have been defrauding statements,” Trump shot again. “They did not embrace the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud.”
As Purpose‘s Jacob Sullum wrote, there have been points with FBI crime information, which was eventually revised, however the information usually jibed with what different public security researchers have been reporting: that crime in 2024 was persevering with to go down.
Now that these numbers are politically helpful, the Trump administration and its allies want to take a really early victory lap. Tolman and Smith write:
Whereas violent crime fell, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE arrests surged—greater than doubling in locations like Sacramento and climbing over 500% in California general. Nationwide, immigration arrests have already topped 300,000 in 2025 alone. That is not political theater. That is legislation enforcement doing its job.
This information exhibits the facility of actual deterrence, the impact of giving legislation enforcement respect and help to do their job. The truth that these historic drops occurred within the absence of passing new legal guidelines provides sturdy proof to the facility of merely letting legislation enforcement do their jobs.
However there is no such thing as a proof but of any deterrent impact, or that crime is falling now due to the administration’s mass deportation program, moderately than for no matter purpose it was falling prior to now. Quantifying the results of legal guidelines and legislation enforcement—and trying to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tough downside in prison justice analysis, and it often takes years to gather and analyze the information.
On its face, the declare that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the issue that many of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 % of individuals arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. The truth is, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have pressured ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of prison networks and critical offenders.
There could be an incapacitative impact on crime from the dimensions of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, however even then, it could possible be statistically minor. Most research which have tried to quantify how a lot the “mass incarceration” period contributed to the nationwide drop in crime that started within the mid-90s have pegged it someplace between single digits and 25 %. And that represented the biggest buildup of prisons and jail populations in U.S. historical past.
Crime additionally fell through the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, however nobody prompt that Joe Biden’s govt order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement have been chargeable for safer cities.
The truth is, fairly the alternative. Through the first Trump administration, former Lawyer Basic Jeff Periods claimed that “gentle” federal drug sentences through the Obama period led to a nationwide rise in violent crime in 2015, despite the fact that these modifications could have solely resulted in shorter sentences for round 500 federal drug offenders every year.
That 2015 rise in crime, by the way in which, turned out to be a blip within the general downward development, which continued till 2020.
It will be tempting to notice who was president when murders spiked in 2020, however presidents and their insurance policies don’t management nationwide crime charges, and if a politician or pundit claims in any other case, it is both wishful pondering or cynical opportunism.
