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Murder rates are plummeting. While we still have more than half a year to go, Kash Patel, the FBI’s director, says that the U.S. is on track to have the lowest murder rate ever. The current record low occurred in 2014 when the FBI reported a murder rate of 4.45 per 100,000.
The question is: why? Law enforcement matters, but it is probably also that Trump is deporting criminal illegal aliens.
According to Patel, “Let good cops be cops,” is the answer. “I’m gonna let you, the agents, the police officers, the sheriffs, go out there and do the work you so badly want to do. And I’m gonna give you the resources you need to do it. And I’m gonna take away the politicization and weaponization … and that’s what we’ve done.”
Instead of placing a third of FBI agents in the D.C. area, Patel has moved them out across the country to where the crime is occurring. A recent Biden administration document that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified shows that law enforcement resources were being spent on “non-criminal” activities of conservative Catholics, people attending school board meetings, and flagging those who used symbols like “2A” and imagery referencing the Second Amendment. The FBI sent a memo to over 1,000 employees nationwide instructing them to target conservative Catholics.
The Trump administration has also been ending DEI and other interventions that the Biden administration was pushing on police departments.
You let law enforcement catch criminals, making it riskier for criminals to commit crime, and you will get less crime.
But there is another reason. Deporting criminal illegals may cause some illegals to lay low so that they don’t risk getting caught. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “ICE operations have received so much attention, prompting migrants to be more cautious, according to agents and leaders.”
Since President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration, the FBI has actively invested over 1 million hours collaborating with ICE, DEA, and local police to arrest more than 10,000 illegal aliens. They are targeting Biden-era border crossers.
A lot of these illegals have criminal backgrounds and if they cut back on the amount of time they are committing to reduce the risks of getting caught, it could have a noticeable impact on crime rates. If you believe the Biden administration, 9 percent of the so-called “non-detained” illegals who were released into the U.S. had criminal backgrounds (662,566 out of 7.4 million released). That is almost assuredly an underestimate as “non-detained” illegals were overwhelmingly those who had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border, presumably the ones we should be least concerned about. It doesn’t count the 2 million “gotaways” we detected crossing the border but failed to apprehend during the Biden administration, nor the unknown millions we never saw coming across the borders. This also assumes the Biden administration didn’t underreport criminal backgrounds. And many countries, such as Venezuela, wouldn’t provide information on the criminal backgrounds of their citizens.
There is other evidence that Trump’s deportation efforts are making a difference in causing illegal aliens to lay low. For example, illegals are leaving the labor force. From January 2021 to January 2025, under Biden’s administration, foreign-born workers filled approximately 4.3 million of the new jobs created, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). However, in just the last four months, the immigrant workforce has plummeted by 773,000 — a staggering 18 percent reversal of that growth in such a short period of time.
A March headline in the New York Times notes: “Fearing roundups, many immigrants are staying home.”
While Biden’s policies freely granted work permits to many illegal immigrants, not all foreign-born workers were undocumented. Still, the sharp decline, coinciding with Trump’s aggressive use of IRS records and other tools to target illegal aliens, signals a clear impact. Undocumented workers are laying low, with reports confirming they’re staying home to avoid deportation sweeps, particularly in industries like agriculture and construction. This sudden shift underscores the effectiveness of Trump’s enforcement tactics in disrupting illegal immigrant participation in the labor market.
A word of caution is needed when discussing these numbers. The US tracks murder/homicide through two sources: FBI data from police departments and CDC data from medical examiners. Academics generally believe the medical examiner reports offer a more accurate final count, and these figures have diverged in recent years. The CDC’s latest data is for 2022, and it reveals the homicide rate minus justified police homicides peaked in 2021 and remained higher in 2022 than in 2020. Meanwhile, FBI murder rate data peaked in 2020 and has declined annually since. Still, the 2023 FBI murder rate, the most recent finalized data, exceeds the pre-Covid 2019 rate (5.75 vs. 5.16).
Reducing crime isn’t rocket science. If you make it riskier for criminals to commit crime, you will get less crime. Letting police focus on going after criminals matters. Getting serious about illegal aliens who are committing crimes can’t be ignored.
John R. Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
Murder rates are plummeting. While we still have more than half a year to go, Kash Patel, the FBI’s director, says that the U.S. is on track to have the lowest murder rate ever. The current record low occurred in 2014 when the FBI reported a murder rate of 4.45 per 100,000.
The question is: why? Law enforcement matters, but it is probably also that Trump is deporting criminal illegal aliens.
According to Patel, “Let good cops be cops,” is the answer. “I’m gonna let you, the agents, the police officers, the sheriffs, go out there and do the work you so badly want to do. And I’m gonna give you the resources you need to do it. And I’m gonna take away the politicization and weaponization … and that’s what we’ve done.”
Instead of placing a third of FBI agents in the D.C. area, Patel has moved them out across the country to where the crime is occurring. A recent Biden administration document that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified shows that law enforcement resources were being spent on “non-criminal” activities of conservative Catholics, people attending school board meetings, and flagging those who used symbols like “2A” and imagery referencing the Second Amendment. The FBI sent a memo to over 1,000 employees nationwide instructing them to target conservative Catholics.
The Trump administration has also been ending DEI and other interventions that the Biden administration was pushing on police departments.
You let law enforcement catch criminals, making it riskier for criminals to commit crime, and you will get less crime.
But there is another reason. Deporting criminal illegals may cause some illegals to lay low so that they don’t risk getting caught. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “ICE operations have received so much attention, prompting migrants to be more cautious, according to agents and leaders.”
Since President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration, the FBI has actively invested over 1 million hours collaborating with ICE, DEA, and local police to arrest more than 10,000 illegal aliens. They are targeting Biden-era border crossers.
A lot of these illegals have criminal backgrounds and if they cut back on the amount of time they are committing to reduce the risks of getting caught, it could have a noticeable impact on crime rates. If you believe the Biden administration, 9 percent of the so-called “non-detained” illegals who were released into the U.S. had criminal backgrounds (662,566 out of 7.4 million released). That is almost assuredly an underestimate as “non-detained” illegals were overwhelmingly those who had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border, presumably the ones we should be least concerned about. It doesn’t count the 2 million “gotaways” we detected crossing the border but failed to apprehend during the Biden administration, nor the unknown millions we never saw coming across the borders. This also assumes the Biden administration didn’t underreport criminal backgrounds. And many countries, such as Venezuela, wouldn’t provide information on the criminal backgrounds of their citizens.
There is other evidence that Trump’s deportation efforts are making a difference in causing illegal aliens to lay low. For example, illegals are leaving the labor force. From January 2021 to January 2025, under Biden’s administration, foreign-born workers filled approximately 4.3 million of the new jobs created, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). However, in just the last four months, the immigrant workforce has plummeted by 773,000 — a staggering 18 percent reversal of that growth in such a short period of time.
A March headline in the New York Times notes: “Fearing roundups, many immigrants are staying home.”
While Biden’s policies freely granted work permits to many illegal immigrants, not all foreign-born workers were undocumented. Still, the sharp decline, coinciding with Trump’s aggressive use of IRS records and other tools to target illegal aliens, signals a clear impact. Undocumented workers are laying low, with reports confirming they’re staying home to avoid deportation sweeps, particularly in industries like agriculture and construction. This sudden shift underscores the effectiveness of Trump’s enforcement tactics in disrupting illegal immigrant participation in the labor market.
A word of caution is needed when discussing these numbers. The US tracks murder/homicide through two sources: FBI data from police departments and CDC data from medical examiners. Academics generally believe the medical examiner reports offer a more accurate final count, and these figures have diverged in recent years. The CDC’s latest data is for 2022, and it reveals the homicide rate minus justified police homicides peaked in 2021 and remained higher in 2022 than in 2020. Meanwhile, FBI murder rate data peaked in 2020 and has declined annually since. Still, the 2023 FBI murder rate, the most recent finalized data, exceeds the pre-Covid 2019 rate (5.75 vs. 5.16).
Reducing crime isn’t rocket science. If you make it riskier for criminals to commit crime, you will get less crime. Letting police focus on going after criminals matters. Getting serious about illegal aliens who are committing crimes can’t be ignored.
John R. Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.
