https://thefederalist.com/2025/06/16/as-deportations-rise-the-u-s-is-on-track-for-the-lowest-murder-rate-on-record/
According to Patel, “Let good cops be cops,” is the answer. “I’m gonna let you, the agents, the police officers, the sheriffs, go out there and do the work you so badly want to do. And I’m gonna give you the resources you need to do it. And I’m gonna take away the politicization and weaponization … and that’s what we’ve done.”

Instead of placing a third of FBI agents in the D.C. area, Patel has moved them out across the country to where the crime is occurring. A recent Biden administration document that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified shows that law enforcement resources were being spent on “non-criminal” activities of conservative Catholics, people attending school board meetings, and flagging those who used symbols like “2A” and imagery referencing the Second Amendment. The FBI sent a memo to over 1,000 employees nationwide instructing them to target conservative Catholics.

You let law enforcement catch criminals, making it riskier for criminals to commit crime, and you will get less crime.

But there is another reason. Deporting criminal illegals may cause some illegals to lay low so that they don’t risk getting caught. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “ICE operations have received so much attention, prompting migrants to be more cautious, according to agents and leaders.”

Since President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration, the FBI has actively invested over 1 million hours collaborating with ICE, DEA, and local police to arrest more than 10,000 illegal aliens. They are targeting Biden-era border crossers.

A lot of these illegals have criminal backgrounds and if they cut back on the amount of time they are committing to reduce the risks of getting caught, it could have a noticeable impact on crime rates. If you believe the Biden administration, 9 percent of the so-called “non-detained” illegals who were released into the U.S. had criminal backgrounds (662,566 out of 7.4 million released). That is almost assuredly an underestimate as “non-detained” illegals were overwhelmingly those who had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border, presumably the ones we should be least concerned about. It doesn’t count the 2 million “gotaways” we detected crossing the border but failed to apprehend during the Biden administration, nor the unknown millions we never saw coming across the borders. This also assumes the Biden administration didn’t underreport criminal backgrounds. And many countries, such as Venezuela, wouldn’t provide information on the criminal backgrounds of their citizens.