by WorldTribune Staff, February 19, 2026 Real World News
When President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agents appeared across the USA in early 2025, prophets of dooms predicted violence. The Left and its media pointed to the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good as proof positive.
“The problem is, the statistics show the opposite. Crime is down. As are police killings since Trump’s deployment of the immigration forces,” posted Kansas City Star columnist David Mastio.”
“Wait, what?” he added.
A report in July of last year by the Council on Criminal Justice found that homicides dropped 17% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, the last year of Biden-Harris regime. Gun assaults were down 21%. Robberies fell 20% and carjackings plummeted by 24%. Even property crimes — like burglary and larceny — saw double-digit declines.
“What the report doesn’t say out loud is that the timing is no coincidence. President Donald Trump is simply enforcing immigration laws already on the books — proof that we don’t need more laws; we just need leaders with the backbone to enforce the laws we have. The results are undeniable: communities nationwide are seeing tangible improvements in public safety,” a Fox News report at the time said.
Police-involved deaths also dropped.
“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,” David Mastio, a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy, noted in a Feb. 19 op-ed.
Daily data published by the leftist police reform group Campaign Zero, which includes figures on killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, claim that in 2025 there were 1,314 police killings compared to 1,382 in 2024 and 1,362 in 2023.
The advocacy-driven Campaign Zero includes data on all police-involved fatal incidents rather than only those that result in criminal charges.
“Indeed, in the month in which Pretti and Good were killed in 2026, police killings were down again compared to 2025,” Mastio noted.
“These facts complicate the political narrative that Trump has unleashed ‘violent and sometimes deadly tactics … by federal immigration officers in communities across the country.’ If they are so violent, why did police kill 68 fewer people in 2025 than 2024?”
ICE and the Border Patrol have arrested and deported thousands of violent criminal illegal aliens.
“Nobody expected such violent predators to go without a fight. Whatever fight they did put up, it wasn’t enough to make the number of police killings rise as they have for the past five years,” Mastio wrote.
Last year The New York Times and others used Campaign Zero as a source to report the increase in police killings in the years since George Floyd’s death.
Progressives were quick to pounce on the Times’ reporting.
“A new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting,” moaned left-wing Mother Jones magazine without noting that the rise in police killings occurred on Biden’s watch.
“We’ll see if anyone notices that police violence went down under Trump. I doubt it,” Mastio wrote.
