The United States is experiencing a historic drop in homicides, and the Trump administration wants you to believe it knows exactly why: mass deportations. Trump told the UN General Assembly last week that the country achieved "the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded" because of border enforcement. JD Vance echoed the claim at an Iowa rally, declaring that "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." The problem is empirical. The homicide decline began in 2023, during the Biden presidency, driven by a complex mix of factors researchers are still untangling — easing of pandemic-era stressors, Biden-era investments in community-based violence prevention, policing shifts, and other variables. No peer-reviewed research establishes a causal link between deportations and lower crime. The body of existing evidence shows no relationship between immigrants, documented or not, and US homicide rates. The Guardian's own analysis undercuts the enforcement narrative from inside the government's data. More than 75% of people entering deportation proceedings for the first time had no criminal convictions. Of over 18,400 ICE arrests between 2025 and June 2026, only 34 individuals were convicted of homicide. The most common convictions were for illegal re-entry and DUI — not violent crime. A September 28 GAO report confirmed there is no comprehensive or centralized data on the citizenship status of people in state prisons and local jails. The White House and DHS, when asked directly by the Guardian for any data or research proving a causal link between immigration enforcement and declining homicides, reiterated their claims but supplied no evidence. This is not a data gap they're working to close — it's a rhetorical strategy that depends on the gap remaining unfilled. The playbook is a decade old. Trump leveraged the Kate Steinle case in 2016 (Steinle's accused killer was acquitted) and the Laken Riley case in 2024 (her killer was convicted and sentenced to life). As University of Wisconsin sociologist Michael Light put it, the argument that these individuals "should have never been able to commit these crimes" is "more of a political disagreement than an empirical one." Anecdotes are powerful, but they are not data, and mistaking them for data leads to bad policy. The institutional machinery is now reinforcing the narrative. The DOJ announced a $25 million grant program this week to support victims of crimes committed by undocumented migrants and fund law enforcement efforts — a spending line that presupposes the very causal link the evidence does not support. Gun Owners of America's vice-president joined the chorus, crediting deportations rather than gun restrictions for the safety gains. University of Colorado law professor Pratheepan Gulasekaram named the mechanism plainly: xenophobia gives the claim its stickiness. "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. The danger, as Light warned, is misdiagnosis: "If we misdiagnose what's actually driving the homicide decline, that's going to lead to bad public policy." Credit-claiming without evidence is not governance — it's marketing, and the midterms are the product.
