Homicides dropped 19% in 2025. Robberies fell 20%. Rapes declined by nine percent, and aggravated assaults dropped by ten points in the same year.
What changed in 2025? I mean, what changed that Axios could credit in its chin-stroking analysis? Guess what word never appears in their review, and no, it's not "Trump" ... exactly:
Violent crime dropped sharply across America's biggest cities in 2025, according to new data reviewed by Axios.
Why it matters: The stats were yet another sign that violent crime in the U.S. was starkly different from what President Trump cited as his reason for sending federal troops to Chicago, Portland, Washington, D.C., Memphis and cities in California.
- "Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now," Trump said in September. "We have the right to [call in the National Guard] because I have an obligation to protect this country."
The big picture: The report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) shows declines across every major violent-crime category in 2025 compared to 2024. It features data from 67 of the nation's biggest police departments, and confirms other studies on last year's declines.
First off, Chicago and Baltimore did see big drops in homicides, but had increases in other violent crimes in 2025. Furthermore, the "starkly different" sets up a fallacy by implying that improvements mean cures. Chicago and Baltimore may have seen sharp drops in their homicide rates in 2025, but those were astronomically high in 2024 and still are high relative to other US cities. Baltimore's 23.6/100K rate is still higher than most US cities', and Chicago's 15.4/100K isn't a vast improvement over Baltimore's.
And this construct doesn't answer the question asked: why did violent crime drop so significantly in 2025? Axios explains that crime had peaked during the first year of the pandemic, thanks to absurd attempts to decriminalize shoplifting, eliminate cash bail, and to "defund the police." Crime rates had actually begun rising before then, but the rates exploded afterward, thanks in large part to the policies adopted in the heat of the George Floyd riots.
Most of those policies have been reversed before 2025, though police recruitment may still lag. Besides, the places where those policies still linger are in the very cities where these numbers fell – Chicago in particular, where Mayor Brandon Johnson called incarceration and law enforcement "a sickness" that he intended to "eradicate." That came at the same time that Trump called Chicago a "hellhole."
And thus we come to the missing word. Axios never once mentions the word "immigration" in this analysis, despite it being the primary law enforcement effort by the federal government in 2025. It was the biggest change in law enforcement, wherein ICE and Border Patrol agents began aggressively enforcing detainers and deporting criminal illegal aliens, many of whom had connections to transnational crime organizations. That effort led to a mass outward migration of illegal aliens in 2025. In fact, 2025 saw an overall net loss in migration for the first time in decades, and not by just a handful either:
For the first time in decades, net migration for the United States was likely negative in 2025, and the trend could continue amid President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement actions, according to a new think tank report.
A "significant" drop-off in new entries into the country coupled with an increase in immigration enforcement activity leading to increased removals and voluntary departures contributed to the close to zero or negative net migration, according to a report released Jan. 13 from the Brookings Institution. Net migration for 2025 was estimated in the report to be between -10,000 and -295,000.
Negative net migration – when more people leave the country than enter – hasn't been seen in the United States in at least 50 years, the report said.
Given that the immigration enforcement efforts in the US have focused on criminal illegal aliens, and that this has prompted a net outward migration of tens of thousands of aliens, did it not occur to Axios that this might explain a sudden drop in crime across the US? It is, at least, a relevant factor, especially given that this enforcement effort appears to be the only significant policy shift that took place in the year when results shifted as dramatically as Axios reports. Its omission from their analysis is a stunning lacuna in their logic, while their claim that the crime decline somehow contradicts Trump can only exist in a bubble that locks out any of Trump's initiatives as potential contributing factors.
The Protection Racket Media refuses to even discuss immigration policy rationally, let alone concede that it might be beneficial. Fortunately, voters are smarter than the media elites, and voters still support the arrest and deportation of illegal aliens, especially those who commit crimes in the US (73% in the latest Harvard-Harris CAPS poll, 52% for all illegal aliens). They understand that ejecting criminals helps bring down crime rates, even if media "experts" either cannot connect those dots, or simply refuse to do so.
Editor's Note: The days of lawlessness without consequences are over. Thanks to President Trump, our nation will be SAFE once again.
Help us continue to report on President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order to our great nation. Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member