Too Good To Check: The Surprising Trend in Law-Enforcement Deaths

... downward? I was assured that the election of Donald Trump had imposed a police state, and that law enforcement had begun a killing spree to terrorize citizens into compliance.

Instead, deaths from law-enforcement encounters declined in the first year of Trump's term, despite the aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. Or is it because? David Mastio wonders at the Kansas City Star, too, especially given the source of the data:

Under President Donald Trump’s national mass deportation effort targeting undocumented immigrants, violence has been an inevitable part of the equation. The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good last month sparked national outrage and increasingly fierce protests in cities across the country. 

But new data shows that as Trump’s unprecedented surge of federal agents poured into neighborhoods across the country, 2025 saw fewer police killings nationwide than either of the last two years of Joe Biden’s term — exactly the opposite of what many feared.

Progressive police reform group Campaign Zero publishes daily data at mappingpoliceviolence.org, including figures on killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. In 2025, their data shows 1,314 police killings compared to 1,382 in 2024 and 1,362 in 2023. 

Indeed, in the month in which Pretti and Good were killed in 2026, police killings were down again compared to 2025.

The reason that the Pretti and Good deaths didn't dent this trend is that they were anomalous – tragic, yes, but rare events. Those shootings took place in an almost unique setting in which local authorities refused to cooperate with ICE and Border Patrol while also refusing to coordinate with their field operations. The Twin Cities and seven other metropolitan areas account for nearly two-thirds of all violent encounters by ICE, as Kevin Bass noted last month in his updated analyses:

I also looked at how many violent confrontations there were per illegal alien.

When you adjust by number of illegal aliens in these cities, Minneapolis goes to #1, with 3x more than #2 Portland.

And 114x the rate of the average of all counties outside the top 8. pic.twitter.com/6nga6N5tQu

— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) January 28, 2026

We can expect these numbers from Minnesota to drop this year, too, now that the Trump administration has forced Tim Walz and Jacob Frey to coordinate with ICE in jails and on the streets. The need for potentially violent street encounters will drop, as will the unhinged obstructionist tactics of the progressive Left. Police in Minneapolis and St. Paul are now coordinating with ICE when field operations are necessary to deal with potential crowd control rather than follow their previous "sanctuary" policies of non-cooperation, policies to which the local police departments had objected all along. 

Furthermore, the detention and removal of thousands of criminal illegal aliens will continue to have a salutary effect on these numbers. Many more are in the process of "self-deportation," and taking their connections to transnational criminal gangs with them. The more that trend continues, the more that potentially violent encounters won't ever have the chance to occur at all. 

However, CBS News identifies a competing trend that may slow down that progress. Threats against public officials rose last year, part of a four-year trend that has seen real violence take place, including two assassination attempts on Trump:

Petersen is one of 126 people charged last year for making threats to federal and top state officials, according to a CBS News analysis of court records from all 94 federal judicial districts. CBS News examined cases brought under federal statutes that make it a crime to threaten to kill or harm the president and successors to the presidency, and to transmit threatening communications. ...

The threats that have resulted in charges do not discriminate in their targets. They were leveled against officials working in all three branches of government — from judges to members of Congress to law enforcement officers to President Trump and former President Joe Biden — and directed at those in the highest levels of state government.

The volume of cases marks a more than three-fold increase in the number of federal prosecutions arising out of threats to public officials over the past decade. 2025 surpassed 2024 in threats-related cases, according to NCITE.

The rise underscores the current landscape for federal officials who were elected to office, appointed to their roles or hired to enforce the law. In today's environment, they face a barrage of threats on social media and in voicemails and emails, and have been swatted or doxxed.

This is the reason that ICE and Border Patrol agents wear face masks while conducting field operations. The threat of violence in these encounters has grown not because of more assertive enforcement of existing immigration law, but because opponents of that policy have done their best to stoke violence during those encounters. And the biggest risk for violence is that against LEOs, always a significant risk when dealing with suspects but now at higher risk of violence from observers-cum-obstructionists. That is the sequence that created the Pretti and Good shootings, and it could have gotten much worse if Minnesota officials hadn't finally thrown in the towel on their obstructionist 'sanctuary' posturing. 

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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