This summer, federal agents in New York City picked up a Ukrainian man charged with kidnapping and murder. They also arrested a Colombian man charged with sex crimes against a child, a Mexican national wanted for first-degree rape, and an Indian citizen who had a rape conviction in Germany and was living freely in the five boroughs.
All four were illegal immigrants. They were among more than 2,000 people ICE arrested in New York in July and August during Operation Rotten Apple.
Across the country, the same thing is happening, and it's showing up in the crime numbers. Under President Trump, the administration says it has removed nearly a million illegal immigrants. Over the same period, murders in America fell 18% in a single year.
The FBI's final numbers for 2025 came out in August. Murders dropped 18.1% from 2024, and the national homicide rate fell to 4.1 per 100,000 people. That ties 1955 and 1956 for the lowest rate in FBI data going back to 1900. Overall violent crime fell more than 9%.
That's a historic drop, and it didn't happen by accident.
The connection isn't complicated. Every criminal illegal immigrant who gets deported is one less repeat offender on American streets. Every person turned back at a secure border is one who never gets the chance to commit a crime here at all. Trump promised both on the campaign trail, and since taking office, he's delivered.
His administration says so plainly. "Crime has fallen to record lows under the Trump administration," said Lauren Bis, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. "It's no surprise that this drop in crime coincides with deportations of dangerous criminal illegal aliens."
Carrie Lukas, president of Independent Women, has estimated what the drop means in human terms: nearly 5,000 Americans alive today who otherwise would have been murdered. "Five thousand Americans are still living, working and loving their families because of policy changes," she said. That's more than all the Americans killed on 9/11.
Critics will say deportations can't explain the entire drop. Nobody said they did. But when you remove people who are here illegally and have records for murder, rape, and child abuse, there are fewer victims. That's not a hard concept.
Americans already know what happens when those people stay. In February 2024, 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley went for a run on the University of Georgia campus and never came home. The man convicted of killing her had crossed the border illegally and was released into the country. Then he was arrested for shoplifting and released again. The first bill Trump signed after returning to office was the Laken Riley Act, which requires the government to detain illegal immigrants charged with crimes like theft and assault.
Operation Rotten Apple shows what that kind of enforcement looks like. New York is a sanctuary city, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration didn't help. ICE went in anyway. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said those arrested included "murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers, and violent assailants." One of them was a Cambodian man with a drug trafficking conviction who had been walking the streets of New York.
Under Trump, people like that are being found and sent home.
Last year, America's murder rate fell 18%, to its lowest level since 1900.