The Left's Blind Spot on Trump's Security Success
By David ManneyIn 2026, murder rates in major U.S. cities dropped to levels not seen since 1900, while violent crime dropped sharply amid President Donald Trump's aggressive deportation efforts.
The numbers are impressive: homicides down 21% in 35 large cities, marking the largest single-year decline on record. Overall, violent offenses returned to or dipped below pre-pandemic figures from 2019, robberies decreased by 23%, and carjackings dropped by 43%. The only category to increase was drug crimes, which rose slightly by 7%.
To White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, it's an easy explanation for why those numbers improved so radically: the administration's whole-of-government approach, including mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens and support for law enforcement.
This ridiculous framing is why Americans don’t trust the media,” responded White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, adding:
President Trump securing the border, mobilizing federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals, and deporting the worst of the worst illegal aliens is EXACTLY what’s driving the massive drop in crime.
Yet, in a Nebraskan field, we find legacy media outlets standing in rows, heads planted like ostriches in old cartoons, with their focus on other factors or downplaying the success altogether.
I wish I were joking; from Axios, emphasis added (mine):
The intrigue: In response to early reports that crime was dropping to record lows, the Trump administration has changed its tone and has begun touting the declines while crediting its policies.
- "After record high crime across the country under Biden's defund the police era, the murder rate has plunged to a 125-year low as crime falls across the board, according to new data," the White House said Monday.
- The White House pointed to the president sending "federal resources into crime-plagued Washington, D.C." as a reason for crime drops in the Nation's Capital.
Reality check: Violent crime rates in many cities have been falling significantly since former President Biden's last two years in office, following a COVID-era crime wave that began in 2020, the final year of Trump's first term.
The bottom line: Experts aren't sure why violent crime continues to fall.
One of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to crack down on crime, though experts say it’s difficult to identify a single factor behind the decline, and crime rates began tumbling a year before Trump took office. Violent crime was already trending downward during President Joe Biden’s final year in office.
The crime data comes as the administration continues aggressive immigration enforcement efforts. The Department of Homeland Security confirms 2.2 million undocumented immigrants were deported over the past year — a figure the White House argues has contributed to the nationwide drop in crime.
New York Times headline: What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.
Deportations Drive the Decline
The Department of Homeland Security removed over 2 million illegal immigrants over the past few years, focusing heavily on those with criminal records, and this surge closely aligns with the steep crime reductions seen nationwide.
Border Czar Tom Homan is in charge of operations that resulted in over 9,000 violent fugitive arrests, including 25 for homicide and 52 known gang members, while seizing over 900 illegal firearms.
In Washington, D.C., where Trump deployed National Guard troops, homicides dropped by 60% and violent crime by over 30%, showing tangible impacts from federal interventions.
Cities like Denver, Omaha, and the nation's capital report the sharpest declines, often over 40% in murders, as local leaders work with federal agents to target criminal networks tied to illegal immigration.
Critics on the left, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck "My Grill Is On" Schumer (D-N.Y.), dismiss these efforts as overreach, insisting that broader social factors explain the trends.
Regardless of how much denial from the left, data shows crime steadily falling since Trump's inauguration, building on a post-pandemic recovery that accelerated under his policies.
Echoes of the 1990s Crime Drop
We've seen this play before.
In the 1990s, violent crime rates across America dropped by 22% from 1991 to 1998 as incarceration rates climbed to 47%, leaving media outlets and experts scrambling to explain the unexpected turnaround that defied predictions of escalating urban chaos.
Sociologists and policymakers debated causes that ranged from expanding policing to economic booms. But there was a much simpler explanation: increased imprisonment accounted for 6% to 35% of the decline, with prison populations quadrupling between 1972 and 1991, then doubling again by 2009.
News "experts" at the time were shocked, shocked! Headlines shifted from dire warnings of superpredators to analyses of sudden safety. Many on the left attributed the drop to anything but tougher penalties, insisting social programs or demographic shifts played larger roles despite evidence linking incarceration's incapacitation and deterrence effects to the reductions. (Emp. mine)
A decade after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and four years after a national racial reckoning triggered by Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd, lawmakers are wavering on their commitment to making the criminal legal system more just and effective. Many are reverting to the failed playbook of the 1990s, which, as this brief will show, dramatically increased incarceration, particularly among Black Americans, with limited benefits to community safety. The recent move away from evidence-based policymaking includes New York’s reversal of its bail reform law, Louisiana’s expansion of its already draconian prison sentences, and Oregon’s repeal of Measure 110, which had decriminalized the possession of controlled substances in favor of a public health response.
From NPR in 2007.
So while politicians talk about getting tough on crime and the U.S. continues to incarcerate a record number of people, we really have no clear idea, scientifically, of what works when it comes to crime fighting. And will we ever be able to understand this historic drop and learn how to keep crime at these low levels, or are we headed back to another surge in crime, back to the bad old days of the 1980s?
That's what we'll be talking about this hour. We spend a lot of money in this country fighting crime. Shouldn't it be going to programs that are known to work, and what are they? And where do we spend money to learn about crime rates? Is enough money being spent to gather all these statistics?
Similar denial persists today as lefty leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) downplay Trump's deportation surge, claiming community initiatives and post-COVID normalization deserve the credit, even though arrests of non-convicted people rose sevenfold and street operations intensified under the Trump administration.
Causality and Common Sense Prevail
Our great philosopher, Homer Simpson, once counseled his acolyte, Bart, on causality in his academic pursuits, apocryphally saying, "Bart, my boy, a donut here makes the grade go up there."
Technically, Homer didn't say it, but he should've!
Just as eating a donut often coincides with better grades, leftists twist correlations to avoid crediting enforcement, but facts reveal deportations remove threats that fuel violence, echoing how locking up offenders in the 1990s cleared the streets of repeated dangers.
Deniers risk irrelevance as communities celebrate restored peace, proving tough policies deliver when ideology fails.
Original Here |
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