DHS data shows most deportation arrests had no homicide convictions
The Trump administration is crediting mass deportations and intensified immigration enforcement for what it calls a historic decline in US homicides, while researchers cited by The Guardian and federal data contradict that causal claim and place the start of the decline during the Biden administration.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump said, “We have the most secure border in the world, nobody comes in, unless they’re invited. Unless they have permission. As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” At an Iowa rally the week before, Vance said, “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. Murder rates, because we got the bad guys out.”
Researchers and reporters have been working through the complex reasons for the decline — from the easing of pandemic-era stressors and the Biden administration’s investments in community-based violence prevention to policing and other factors. The drop did not begin during Trump’s second term, according to researchers cited by The Guardian. It started in 2023, when Biden was president.
“There’s no data that proves mass deportations or enhanced immigration enforcement leads to lower crime rates,” The Guardian reported experts as saying, “and the research that does exist shows there is no relationship between immigrants — documented or not — and homicide rates in the US.”
Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was direct in his assessment. “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,” he told the paper. “If you live in a fact-free world this is the type of nonsensical data you’re willing to imbibe.”
Gulasekaram said xenophobia helps explain why the unsubstantiated claim resonates. “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 claim. 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 approach to immigration enforcement. “It didn’t come from new gun restrictions,” Pratt said in an email to The Guardian. “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.”
Federal data does not appear to support the claim. A Guardian analysis published in February found that more than 75% of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time had no criminal convictions. Department of Homeland Security data, as cited by The Guardian, shows that only 34 of more than 18,400 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2025 and June 2026 were convicted of killing someone. The most common convictions among those arrested were illegal re-entry, driving under the influence, and a category marked as “other.”
It remains unclear how many undocumented migrants are currently incarcerated in state prisons for murder convictions or have been convicted of killing someone since Trump took office. With the exception of Texas, state prisons do not track immigration status among the demographic information they record. A Government Accountability Office report published 28 September said there is no comprehensive or centralized federal data on the citizenship status of people held in local jails and state prisons.
Trump has for a decade linked undocumented immigration to violent crime, often citing individual cases. In his 2016 presidential campaign, he repeatedly raised the killing of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman killed in San Francisco in 2015; the man charged in her death was undocumented and was eventually acquitted. During his 2024 campaign, Trump frequently cited the killing of Laken Riley, a nursing student killed while jogging; her killer, an undocumented immigrant, 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.
Sociologist Michael Light, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the pattern of citing individual tragedies is a political rather than empirical argument. “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,” Light said. “But that’s more of a political disagreement than an empirical one.”
Light added that misdiagnosing the cause of the decline carries policy consequences. “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 $25 million grant program to support people whose loved ones were killed or injured by undocumented migrants and to fund law enforcement efforts intended to prevent future deaths.
The Guardian said it contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to request data or research that could establish a causal link between immigration enforcement and the falling homicide rate. Both agencies reiterated their claim that deportations are the reason homicides are down, the paper reported, and neither supplied evidence.