Police walk at a scene of shooting after several people were shot at a family gathering in Stockton, California. 29 November 2025. Photograph: Fred Greaves/ReutersView image in fullscreenPolice walk at a scene of shooting after several people were shot at a family gathering in Stockton, California. 29 November 2025. Photograph: Fred Greaves/ReutersTrump and his allies credit deportations with record low crime. Experts disagreeAdministration says increased immigration enforcement led to fewer homicides, but they have been on the decline since Joe Biden’s term
Over the last year and a half, the US has seen a historic drop in homicides. Researchers and reporters are still puzzling through the complex set of reasons why - from the easing of pandemic-era stressors and the Biden administration’s investments in community-based violence prevention to policing and other factors.
But for the Trump administration, there’s one easy explanation: increased immigration enforcement. As the midterm elections approach, the White House has been doubling down on this message, saying its crackdown against immigrants is why US crime rates are now falling.
Read more“We have the most secure border in the world, nobody comes in, unless they’re invited. Unless they have permission,” Trump said during a speech to the UN general assembly last week. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.”
JD Vance, the vice-president, made a similar claim at a rally in Iowa the week prior. “When you get the violent criminals out of your country you see the largest drop in violent crime in the history of the United States of America,” he said. “Murder rates, because we got the bad guys out.”
There’s no data that proves mass deportations or enhanced immigration enforcement leads to lower crime rates, and the research that does exist shows there is no relationship between immigrants – documented or not – and homicide rates in the US, experts say.
View image in fullscreenICE agents make an arrest during an early morning operation in Park Ridge, Illinois, on 19 September 2025. Photograph: Erin Hooley/AP“It’s a specious claim if you’ve never attempted to verify anything with actual facts and are willing to believe what the administration will tell you,” said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “If you live in a fact-free world this is the type of nonsensical data you’re willing to imbibe.”
In addition, the plummeting homicide rate the US is experiencing now didn’t start during Trump’s second term. It started in 2023, when Biden was president, researchers say.
Even though there’s no evidence to back up the Trump administration’s claims, Gulasekaram said xenophobia is one reason why they resonate with many Americans. “There’s an intuitive appeal to that claim if you start with the premise that foreigners are so different from us and are the source of economic and social ills,” he said. “That feeds into that underlying sentiment and it becomes extremely sticky.”
Other conservatives are echoing the White House’s unsubstantiated claims by making the same link between immigrants and crime. In a May Instagram video, Erich Pratt, vice-president of Gun Owners of America argued that Americans are “enjoying unprecedented safety”, because of the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
“It didn’t come from new gun restrictions,” he said in an email to the Guardian of the plummeting homicide rates across the US. “It came from a shift in priorities. President Trump implemented measures aimed at deporting violent gang members, ending catch-and-release policies for illegal aliens, and getting repeat offenders off the streets.”
A Guardian analysis published in February showed that more than 75% of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time had no criminal convictions. Only 34 of more than 18,400 people arrested by ICE between 2025 and June this year were convicted of killing someone, according to DHS data. The most common convictions were for illegal re-entry, driving under the influence and a category marked as “other.”
It’s unclear how many undocumented migrants are currently in prison for murder convictions or have been convicted for killing someone since Trump took office. State prisons track demographic information such as age, race and type of conviction but, with the exception of Texas, immigration status is not one of them.
And by the federal government’s own acknowledgement, there is no comprehensive or centralized data on the citizenship status of people incarcerated in local jails and state prisons, the government accountability office said in a 28 September report.
Still, Trump has spent a decade claiming, without evidence, that undocumented migrants pose a safety threat to US citizens. In his 2016 presidential run, he repeatedly talked about the killing of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who had been killed in San Francisco the year before. The man accused of killing her was undocumented, but he was eventually acquitted. And during his 2024 run, he often spoke of Laken Riley, a nursing student who was killed while she was jogging. Her killer was an undocumented immigrant, and was sentenced to life in prison.
Researchers say that stories like these have long been used to push for tougher immigration policies and more deportations.
View image in fullscreenPeople protest against ICE in New York on 6 April 2026. Photograph: Melissa Bender/NurPhoto/Shutterstock“The argument in their tragic cases is that they should have never been at risk because this person should have never been able to commit these crimes,” said Michael Light, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But that’s more of a political disagreement than an empirical one.”
Leaning on these kinds of anecdotes to determine immigration policy, and then claiming that they have led to public safety can cause misunderstandings of why homicides and other crimes have decreased, Light said.
“There’s no question that they’ve increased enforcement and we’ve seen a historic decrease in homicides,” he said. “But the idea that immigration policy is the only thing that’s changed is problematic. And if we misdiagnose what’s actually driving the homicide decline, that’s going to lead to bad public policy.”
This week, the Department of Justice announced a new $25m grant program to support people whose loved ones were killed or injured by undocumented migrants and fund law enforcement efforts to prevent future deaths.
The Guardian reached out to DHS and the White House to request any data or research that can prove a causal relationship between immigration enforcement and the declining homicide rate. Both agencies reiterated their claims that deportations are the reason homicides are down, but did not supply any evidence.
