As Deportation Efforts Step Up, Homicides Are Stepping Down

ICE is trying to do its job, and a lot of people aren’t happy about it. They seem to have an issue with removing any illegal immigrant from the United States, regardless of anything else.

Anti-gun lawmaker Rep. Maxwell Frost thinks we should just offer blanket amnesty.

🚨Democrat Rep. Maxwell Frost says he wants amnesty for every single illegal alien in America: “Let’s document EVERY single one of them with a speedy path to citizenship.” pic.twitter.com/chgTnxhTuY

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) June 18, 2025

Now, we don’t usually talk about illegal immigration because we focus on the Second Amendment and issues relating to it, including violent crime. While entering the country illegally is a crime, it’s not usually violent. That seems to come later.

And, far too often, it does.

While there are studies claiming that illegal immigrants aren’t a problem, we all know how studies can go.

Yet there’s an interesting correlation that’s worth talking about. Over at The Federalist, John Lott noted that as deportations increase, the homicide rate is seemingly decreasing. Yes, FBI Director Kash Patel moved a bunch of agents out of DC where they could, you know, catch bad guys, but that’s far from the only factor that may be at play.

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.

If the numbers of the “gotaways” are even worse, then it’s no surprise that the last handful of years have been so relatively violent. What we do know is that most of the crimes in those backgrounds aren’t things like a DUI or a minor shoplifting charge. Sure, some of that is there as well, but a lot of the crimes are big-time offenses that should make everyone worried.

You can’t have such an influx of violent people without it having some impact on violent crime.

As deportations continue, mostly focusing on these kinds of people, they’re either going to go home or keep their heads down. Violent criminals generally are capable of controlling themselves when they want to. They just don’t want to, most of the time.

Now, they have a reason to control themselves.

If they don’t, they run the risk of being caught and deported back to whatever hole they crawled out of, many times facing either charges or retribution from rivals. 

So, they’re knocking it off.

It’s almost like if you get tough on criminals, they respond by stopping what they’re doing.

Weird, right?