Arrest data do not show charges dropped or time served
The FWD.us analysis covers publicly available FBI and immigration arrest data. It does not include whether charges were dropped or whether people served time in jail or prison. Across the United States, arrests for low-level crimes, including vagrancy and drug possession, rose from 2024 to 2025 even as violent-crime rates, including homicide, plummeted to historic national lows.
Vagrancy arrests rose 44%, from 22,769 in 2024 to 32,728 in 2025. California, Hawaii, Nevada and Arizona accounted for more than half of the increase. The report defines vagrancy as “roaming from place to place without a permanent job, home, or material resources” and says the law is enforced disproportionately against people experiencing homelessness.
Asian Americans and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders made up the majority of vagrancy arrests, according to FWD.us. Although AANHPI people make up only about 7% of the U.S. population, they accounted for 17% of the increase in vagrancy arrests, largely in Hawaii.
Marijuana-possession arrests rose 6%, mainly in Southern states that had not legalized the drug, from 190,182 in 2024 to 201,273 a year later. Black people accounted for 83% of the national increase in marijuana arrests in 2025 and 45% of all cannabis arrests, according to FWD.us.
Arrests for possession of drugs other than marijuana rose 3%, from 508,087 in 2024 to 523,520 in 2025. FWD.us said the increase appeared tied to the unraveling of policies that decriminalized drug possession in some states.
California saw the biggest jump in drug-possession arrests. Voters in California approved Proposition 36 in 2024. The measure rolled back a change that had reclassified drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor and increased criminal penalties for repeat thieves and drug users. FWD.us said drug-possession arrests rose by more than 14,000 in a single year after the measure’s passage.
Oregon similarly reinstated a policy that made simple drug possession a criminal offense again that year. FWD.us said the change produced a 39% increase, or 2,205, in non-marijuana drug-possession arrests.
Immigration-violation arrests rose 188%, from a reported 109,936 in 2024 to 316,304 in 2025. NPR noted that it had previously covered the trend.
FWD.us tied the increase in arrests in part to changes at the federal level. The data covered the first full year of President Trump’s second term, and NPR reported that the administration leaned on a tough-on-crime message during that period. The administration expanded its deportation efforts, arresting hundreds of thousands nationwide, many of whom had no criminal convictions, and sent millions of federal dollars to local police through the 287(g) program, which allows local police to make immigration arrests.
FWD.us believes federal deployments of immigration officers and the National Guard may have also led to increased policing and subsequently more arrests. In summer 2025, Trump claimed American cities including Washington, D.C., were suffering from a “crime emergency” despite data showing violent crime in the city was at a record low in 2024. He sent hundreds of National Guard troops to the city. FWD.us found that arrests in Washington, D.C., for marijuana possession “more than doubled” following the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops.
FWD.us’s report said vagrancy arrests may also be tied to actions by the Supreme Court. Two years earlier, the court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places. The ruling allowed Oregon and dozens of other Western localities to limit where individuals living in cars, parks and other encampments could stay.
Zoë Towns, FWD.us’s executive director, spoke to NPR ahead of the report’s Wednesday release. She said, “This increase signals a really troubling return to some of the extreme law and order policies that defined the American criminal justice system during the 80s and the 90s.” She was referring to tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory minimum prison sentences, that she said led to a massive rise in incarceration in the United States for decades.
Towns also said, “An arrest has life-changing consequences for the person involved and for their family. It can mean days or months in jail. It can mean a lost job. It can mean missed rent or a missed mortgage payment,” and said an arrest can mean families separated. A representative for the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the analysis.
Insha Rahman, president and director of the criminal justice reform nonprofit Vera Institute, which was not involved in the FWD.us report, said there were still “incredibly positive trends” showing crime across the board was down.
Adult arrests for drug crimes peaked in 2006 at about 1.7 million, more than 2.5 times the number recorded in 1980, and continued downward.
Rahman said the decline “speaks to the resilience of states and localities that have continued to double down and invest in what works.” Her examples included treatment and diversion programs for people struggling with addiction, community violence intervention programs, youth services, counseling and alternative response programs.