Homicides are down 18%. Carjackings are down 47%. Motor vehicle thefts are down 20%. Robberies are down 17%. Residential burglaries are down 13%. And according to a Council on Criminal Justice analysis, the national murder rate is now on pace for its lowest level since 1900.
1900 is the year before Teddy Roosevelt took office.
The Department of Homeland Security isn't being coy about the reason. Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis put it in the plainest possible English: "It is common sense. When you remove criminals from the country, crime rates fall."
You take criminal gang members out of American neighborhoods, and the crime statistics in those neighborhoods go down. The Council on Criminal Justice ran the numbers. DHS ran the deportation flights. The results are sitting right there in black and white.
The specifics tell the story better than any policy paper. On July 18, Jared Adonay Cruz-Rivera, a Honduran national and member of the Tren de Aragua — classified as a foreign terrorist organization — was deported. On July 27, Olegario Ramirez, a Mexican national and member of the Paisas gang, was removed. Same day, Bulmaro Rendon-Ramos, a Surenos gang member, also a Mexican national, went home. July 28, Nammoun Khampanya, a Laotian national and Crips gang member, was deported. Omar Loaces Gonzalez, a Cuban national, was removed on July 17. Marc James Guerrier Pinard, a Haitian national, on July 16.
Those aren't undocumented dishwashers. Those are gang members affiliated with organizations that specialize in murder, extortion, and drug trafficking. Every one of them was living in the United States. Every one of them is now somewhere else. And the crime rate keeps dropping.
Bis added: "President Trump promised to make America safe again, and he has done just that." And then the number that deserves to be printed on a billboard: "Crime has fallen to record lows under the Trump administration, including murders on pace to drop to the lowest level in 126 years."
The standard objection from the usual academic corners is that crime was already trending down before deportations accelerated. Which is a curious argument to make when you're staring at a 47% drop in carjackings. Gradual trends don't produce 47% drops. Something changed. DHS is telling you what changed. The CCJ data confirms what changed. The only people struggling with the explanation are the ones who spent three years insisting that deportations would have no effect on public safety.
There's a reason every one of those statistics lands harder than a policy speech. A number like 18% is abstract. But a 47% drop in carjackings means real people in real cities who didn't get dragged out of their cars this year. A 13% drop in residential burglaries means families who came home to find their front door still locked. These aren't political talking points. They're police reports that didn't get filed.
The last time America's homicide rate was this low, there were 45 states, the airplane hadn't been invented yet, and the most dangerous thing in a major city was a horse-drawn trolley.
The policy didn't require a new theory. It just required doing the obvious thing and measuring what happened next.
