Try As He Might, Trump Can’t Take Credit for the Nation’s Murder Drop

One development during that time frame was an unprecedented outlay of federal funding for community violence intervention. “We spent a ton of money — like an incomprehensibly large amount of money — on things that have obvious connections to crime reduction,” Asher said.

Trump Claimed That Washington, D.C., Is Now One of the Country’s Safest Cities Thanks to His Federal Troop Deployment.
Trump sent National Guard troops and federal agents to the nation’s capital in August as a visible crimefighting deterrent. In last night’s State of the Union, he claimed that by doing so, he’d wiped out crime in the city: “I deployed our National Guard and federal law enforcement to restore law and order to our most dangerous cities, including Memphis, Tennessee, big success; New Orleans, Louisiana, big success; and our nation’s capital itself, Washington, D.C., where we have almost no crime anymore,” the president said. “How did that happen?”

Washington, and many other cities across the country, are experiencing record-low violent crime and homicide rates. But the data doesn’t support the assertion that the decreases are the result of Trump’s deployments. As The Trace reported in October, the steep downward trend predated Trump’s deployment by several months. Experts back that up. 

“In D.C., you’ve seen a massive drop in crime from the middle of 2023 through the summer of 2025 that just continued at the same level,” Asher, the crime statistician, said at the February 18 panel. “Maybe there were a couple of weeks of lower gun violence” as a result of the deployments, “but again, that’s hard to tease out when you’ve had two straight years of large declines in gun violence.”

Trump’s federal occupation and immigration enforcement actions aren’t the reason for the drop in violence in the other cities he mentioned in his speech, either. Like Washington, Chicago and Minneapolis have maintained the downward trajectories they were already on, according to a Trace analysis of Gun Violence Archive data. Memphis was already amid a drop in violent crime when Trump deployed several hundred federal law enforcement officers to the city in September, Asher said. There may be at least some exceptions, however: Shooting deaths have actually ticked up slightly in New Orleans and Los Angeles since Trump’s operations began, according to The Trace’s analysis. 

Last year, Trump justified an increased federal presence in Portland, Oregon, by claiming it was “war-ravaged.” We found that also wasn’t true. Since Trump’s action, the decline in shootings Portland had been experiencing has mostly stalled. The president pulled the guard troops from Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles in January.

Trump Described Immigrants as “Criminals.”
Trump touted his closure of the southern border to virtually all immigration and derided the Biden administration for letting in criminals. “They poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions,” he said in his speech. “They were murderers.” Later he said sanctuary cities protect “drug lords” from deportation.

There’s no evidence that the migrants and refugees who crossed into the United States under the Biden administration were disproportionately criminals. And most of the people Trump is deporting do not have a criminal record, according to a recent New York Times analysis.

Trump often portrays immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, as being responsible for most crime. But federal government data contradicts that. A January 2024 study from the National Institute of Justice found that undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes, and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. Between 2012 and 2018, undocumented immigrants in Texas had the lowest offending rates overall for both felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. The group that had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types: U.S.-born citizens. 

A Justice Department-backed 2024 analysis of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety found that undocumented immigrants were 26 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide, and immigrants who were here legally were 61 percent less likely. A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found no empirical evidence to support the notion that undocumented immigrants are responsible for an outsized share of violent crime.

One reason people cross the border illegally is that every year, hundreds of thousands of firearms from the United States fuel high rates of violence in Central America and Mexico.

Trump has also derided sanctuary cities for not carrying out some aspects of federal immigration enforcement. But those places — many of them in Democratic-led states — have lower crime rates than other comparable areas, according to FBI data.

Jennifer Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace. Chip Brownlee is a staff writer at The Trace covering federal policy related to violence prevention and firearms. This article is published courtesy of The Trace.