It's 2026 and Crime Is Down in the U.S., But Don't Credit Mass Deportation With the Decline

One of President Trump's major presidential campaigns was to crack down on criminal immigrants, and to deport those criminals back to their country of origin. To fulfill that promise, one of the things he did was ramp up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. In September President Trump was at a United Nations meeting when he linked his aggressive mass deportation with the largest drop in violent crime. A couple of weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation similarly credited the Trump administration and its mass deportation with a decline in crime. 

The intuition behind this explanation goes something like this. If a significant number of crimes are being committed by illegal immigrants, then removing those individuals should reduce the number of crimes in the U.S. Fewer criminals on the streets, fewer crimes. Makes sense, doesn't it? 

Even if you accept the premise that removing some criminals prevents them from committing additional crimes in the United States, that doesn't establish that mass deportation is responsible for a nationwide decline in crime. When we examine the data and the timeline, the administration's explanation for the decline in crime becomes much less convincing. 

Before getting into what caused the increase in crime, we have to address an assumption of the Trump administration, mainly that illegal immigrants disproportionately commit crime. As I scrutinized in a piece last May, native-born citizens commit crimes at a higher rate than immigrants, and that even includes when you look at undocumented immigrants. The Cato Institute pointed out that if native-born citizens committed crimes at the same rate as illegal immigrants, there would be 701,000 fewer people in prison. That's a significant number of people when you consider there are about 2 million people in U.S. prisons!

Are there some undocumented immigrants that commit crimes in the United States? Yes, there are, and they should individually be held accountable for their crimes. But to say that undocumented immigrants are a major public safety threat that should be collectively judged by their immigration status is unfounded by the data. That is the whole premise of individual responsibility, that we should judge people by their individual actions rather than collective guilt based on where they were born or immigration status. 

Even if you accept that some criminals have been taken off the streets by Trump's ICE detentions and deportations, there is the question of whether Trump's mass deportation is actually responsible for the decline in crime. The inconvenient truth with Trump's claim is that the homicide rate was declining before he got back into office in 2025. 

It wasn't just homicide rates. Between 2019 and 2025, homicides declined by 25%, robberies by 36%, residential burglaries by 45%, and carjackings by 29% (Council on Criminal Justice). Trump's deportation coincides with a decline in crime, but the broader downward trend predates the deportations. After all, if you cannot establish correlation, how can you claim causation?  

So if mass deportations are not the main determinant, what is causing the decline? The Council on Criminal Justice convened about 50 criminal justice experts to figure out what was going on. There were a number of answers to what contributed. Some of the answers that the researchers have empirical evidence to back it up, including the easing of pandemic restrictions, focused deterrence, and hot-spots policing. You want to know what was toward the bottom of the list? Increased immigration enforcement. 

And what about evidence showing that mass deportation demonstrably works? The government's Secure Communities program provides an opportunity to examine that question. The program, which expanded cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, resulted in more than 250,000 detentions. A 2014 study on Secure Communities shows that there was no observable effect on crime rates.  The researchers in the 2014 study point out that although it was targeted towards more serious offenders, the marginal detainee was a less serious offender than the marginal criminal. There is a 2019 study finding that this program did not reduce violent or property crime. This study also showed that the program did not improve police effectiveness.

If anything, it's possible that Secure Communities made people less safe. A 2026 study shows that Hispanic victims became less likely to report crimes to police because of increased deportation fears. This reduction in reporting led to increased crimes victimizing Hispanics. The researchers found that a 10% decline in crime reporting was associated with a 7.9% increase in offending. Since they are deterred from reporting crimes, they are made easier targets for criminals, which is unacceptable if you ask me.

To be fair, Secure Communities is not on the scale or scope of what Trump's mass deportation is. Nevertheless, Secure Communities' failure should challenge the notion that deportations automatically lead to a reduction in crime rates. And that brings us back full circle. Since undocumented workers commit crimes at lower rates, even if you removed a large number of them, it is not going to have a huge net effect on overall crime rates. Perhaps if the administration was targeting the most egregious offenders, it could produce different results on violent crime rates. But that is an argument for targeted deportation, not the mass deportation that Trump has been carrying out. Yet another way I know it went too far?  In a recent 60 Minutes interview, even President Trump himself admitted that his mass deportation was "too tough."

Ultimately the burden of proof rests with those claiming that mass deportation lowers crime. Unfortunately for the Trump administration, crime was already declining before he got back into office, undocumented immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than native-born citizens, and the U.S.-based research hasn't determined that the sort of mass deportation Trump is doing actually lowers crime rates. But why let facts get in the way of an overly simplistic political sound bite?