OPINION / COMMENTARY
ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
For years we were told that “law and order” was a dog whistle, that the border was an abstraction, and that anyone who dared connect illegal immigration to crime was a bigot with a spreadsheet. Well, the spreadsheet just came back — and it is a bloodbath for that narrative. The nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice released its Mid-Year 2026 crime report on July 22, and the numbers read like a Trump campaign ad written by the data itself.
Across 36 large American cities, nine of thirteen tracked offenses fell in the first half of 2026 compared with the same stretch of 2025. Homicide dropped 18 percent — 215 fewer bodies in the morgue across the 30 cities that report it — putting the country on pace for its lowest homicide rate since at least 1900. Read that again. Not since the Obama years. Not since the 1990s. Since 1900. Carjacking is down 47 percent. Motor vehicle theft down 20. Robbery down 17. Residential burglary down 13. Measured from their recent peaks the collapse is even uglier for the doom crowd: homicide down 51 percent from 2022, carjacking down 73 percent from 2023, car theft cut clean in half.
In Washington, D.C. — the very city where the political class clutched its pearls over “over-policing” — motor vehicle theft fell 54 percent, the steepest drop of any city measured. Funny how that works.
The Trump administration is not being shy about why. The White House called the report “extraordinary progress” in “delivering on one of President Trump’s core promises to restore law and order.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt credited the President’s law-and-order push directly. And Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis put it in words a fifth-grader could follow: “It is common sense. When you remove criminals from the country, crime rates fall.” She is right, and the entire credentialed class knows she is right — which is precisely why they cannot stand hearing it.
DHS is not dealing in abstractions, either. According to the department, recent deportees include Jared Adonay Cruz-Rivera, a Honduran national and alleged member of the Tren de Aragua terror organization with a prior robbery conviction, removed July 18. Olegario Ramirez, a Mexican national tied to the Paisas gang with convictions for homicide and illegal re-entry, gone July 27. Marc James Guerrier Pinard, a Haitian national convicted on three counts of armed carjacking, deported July 16. Every one of those men was, until recently, someone else’s neighbor. Now they are their own country’s problem. Multiply that by the thousands and you do not need a PhD to predict what happens to the carjacking column.
Now, the fine print — because this column will not lie to you the way the other side does. The CCJ, to its credit, is careful. It says flatly there is “no single or easy explanation” for the decline, that its report “is not evidence of the success or failure of any policy or practice,” and it notes the downward trend began back in the second half of 2022. The media has grabbed that last line like a life raft — see, it started under Biden! Fine. Concede it. The trend started years ago. But trends do not fall to 126-year lows on autopilot. They get there when a government finally decides to enforce its own laws, remove the worst of the worst, and stop treating the border like a polite suggestion. The decline that limped along under the last administration has cratered into historic territory exactly as the mass removal of criminal aliens hit full stride. The left wants a medal for lighting a candle; Trump flipped on the floodlights.
And no, not every number is rosy — the honest read cuts both ways. Domestic violence ticked up 8 percent, sexual assault 3, shoplifting 4, and drug offenses jumped 12. Those are real problems, and this column will not pretend otherwise. But the violent, headline crimes that actually terrorize a neighborhood — the murders, the carjackings, the armed robberies — are in freefall. That is the ballgame.
So here is the uncomfortable truth for everyone who spent a decade calling border enforcement cruel and pointless: it worked. The bodies are down. The stolen cars are down. The blood on the pavement is drying up. The Council on Criminal Justice can hedge all it likes about “multiple factors,” and the academics can convene their September summits to agonize over the “why.” The rest of us already know the answer, and Lauren Bis already said it out loud: when you remove criminals from the country, crime rates fall. Common sense. Say it with us.
Sources:
- Council on Criminal Justice, “Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2026 Update” — https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-2026-update/
- Council on Criminal Justice press release, “Homicide Likely Reaching a New Historic Low” — https://counciloncj.org/homicide-likely-reaching-a-new-historic-low-as-most-crime-rates-continue-to-decline-at-mid-year/
- Fox News, “DHS credits deportations of criminal immigrants for falling crime rates” — https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-points-common-sense-reason-collapsing-crime-no-surprise
- UPI, “U.S. homicide rate drops 18%, nearing historic low” — https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/07/23/council-criminal-justice-crime-rates-decline-2026/4491784818522/
- The Hill, “New report shows U.S. homicide rate could hit record low by 2026” — https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5985887-ccj-report-crime-trends-2026/