Trump administration takes credit for crime drop it previously denied existing

A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found that homicides are significantly down in major cities across the country compared to last year, and the Trump administration is claiming its mass deportation program is part of the reason.

“HOMICIDES DOWN 17% across 30 U.S. cities under President [Donald] Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem],” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted on X Monday. “The rapid arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having real impact on public safety.”

????HOMICIDES DOWN 17% across 30 U.S. cities under President Trump and @Sec_Noem.

The rapid arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having real impact on public safety.

Check out these stats: pic.twitter.com/oW6c7NwBeF

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 28, 2025

In a Fox News op-ed published Monday, Brett Tolman, the executive director of Right on Crime, a conservative-leaning criminal justice advocacy group, and Ja’Ron K. Smith, a White House special assistant, also explicitly tied the CCJ report’s numbers to Trump’s immigration policies.

Tolman and Smith write that “what the report doesn’t say out loud is that the timing is no coincidence.” 

“President Donald Trump is simply enforcing immigration laws already on the books—proof that we don’t need more laws; we just need leaders with the backbone to enforce the laws we have,” Tolman and Smith continued. “The results are undeniable: communities nationwide are seeing tangible improvements in public safety.”

First, one must begin by congratulating the Trump administration on its sudden, enthusiastic embrace of crime statistics. Trump and his reelection campaign repeatedly claimed in 2024 that crime was spiking even though it had been generally dropping since 2022.

“Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” the Trump campaign falsely declared last August.

At an October presidential debate, Trump again claimed, “crime in this country is through the roof.” When a debate moderator told Trump that preliminary FBI data showed a steep drop in violent crime in 2024, Trump, as is his habit, called the numbers fake. 

“They were defrauding statements,” Trump shot back. “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crimes. It was a fraud.”

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote, there were issues with FBI crime data, which was eventually revised, but the data generally jibed with what other public safety researchers were reporting: that crime in 2024 was continuing to go down.

Now that those numbers are politically useful, the Trump administration and its allies would like to take a very early victory lap. Tolman and Smith write:

While violent crime fell, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE arrests surged—more than doubling in places like Sacramento and climbing over 500% in California overall. Nationwide, immigration arrests have already topped 300,000 in 2025 alone. That’s not political theater. That’s law enforcement doing its job.

This data shows the power of real deterrence, the effect of giving law enforcement respect and support to do their job. The fact that these historic drops occurred in the absence of passing new laws gives strong evidence to the power of simply letting law enforcement do their jobs. 

But there is no evidence yet of any deterrent effect, or that crime is falling now because of the administration’s mass deportation program, rather than for whatever reason it was falling in the past. Quantifying the effects of laws and law enforcement—and attempting to attribute causation to dips and spikes in crime—is a notoriously tricky problem in criminal justice research, and it usually takes years to collect and analyze the data.

On its face, the claim that Trump’s immigration enforcement is driving down crime runs into the problem that most of the immigrants being arrested aren’t criminals. About 60 percent of people arrested by ICE between January and June had no criminal record. In fact, the Trump administration’s quotas for arrests and deportations have forced ICE and DHS to stop prioritizing investigations of criminal networks and serious offenders.

There may well be an incapacitative effect on crime from the scale of the Trump administration’s mass deportations, but even then, it would likely be statistically minor. Most studies that have attempted to quantify how much the “mass incarceration” era contributed to the national drop in crime that began in the mid-90s have pegged it somewhere between single digits and 25 percent. And that represented the largest buildup of prisons and prison populations in U.S. history.

Crime also fell during the Obama administration and the second half of the Biden administration, but no one suggested that Joe Biden’s executive order banning police chokeholds or Barack Obama’s lax marijuana enforcement were responsible for safer cities.

In fact, quite the opposite. During the first Trump administration, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed that “soft” federal drug sentences during the Obama era led to a nationwide rise in violent crime in 2015, even though those changes may have only resulted in shorter sentences for around 500 federal drug offenders each year. 

That 2015 rise in crime, by the way, turned out to be a blip in the overall downward trend, which continued until 2020. 

It would be tempting to note who was president when murders spiked in 2020, but presidents and their policies do not control national crime rates, and if a politician or pundit claims otherwise, it’s either wishful thinking or cynical opportunism.