Over the past year, mainstream media outlets have devoted headlines and airtime to vilifying and demonizing President Donald Trump and his various presidential actions, most notably deportations and the president’s use of federal forces and the National Guard to address skyrocketing crime rates. These same mainstream media outlets are now publishing headlines centered on the drastic fall in murder rates across the U.S., but without crediting the Trump administration’s decisive actions.

A report from the Council on Criminal Justice, examining crime rates in 35 major U.S. cities, found that homicides fell by 21% in 2025, while aggravated assaults, gun assaults, robberies, and carjackings also decreased significantly. Drug crimes were the only category that increased, by 7%. The Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), a professional coalition of police executives representing the largest cities in the country, reported similar results: a 19% decline in homicides in 67 of the 68 largest U.S. cities over the course of 2025, falling from nearly 7,000 homicides in 2024 to fewer than 5,500 last year.

Only 10 of the reporting jurisdictions — Boston, Massachusetts; El Paso, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; Mesa, Arizona; Milwaukee; Montgomery County, Maryland; Nassau County, New York; Omaha, Nebraska; Suffolk County, New York; and Wichita, Kansas — saw an increase in homicide rates. Of those, Boston, Milwaukee, Montgomery County, Nassau County, and Suffolk County have been identified by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) as “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where state or local police are prohibited from cooperating or collaborating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and operations.

The president has long touted his deportation program as a means of ridding the U.S. of violent criminals. The Department of Homeland Security boasts on its website that it has arrested over 760 illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of homicide, as well as thousands more who have been charged with or convicted of violent crimes such as rape, sexual assault, rape and sexual assault of children, assault, battery, robbery and burglary, kidnapping, and domestic violence, among other crimes. Yet mainstream media outlets refuse to make the correlation between the Trump administration’s policies and cratering crime rates.

Axios reported on Tuesday that violent crime has “dropped sharply across America’s biggest cities in 2025,” before proceeding to castigate the Trump administration. “The stats were yet another sign that violent crime in the U.S. was starkly different from what President Trump cited as his reason for sending federal troops to Chicago, Portland, Washington, D.C., Memphis and cities in California,” the outlet’s “justice and race reporter” Russell Contreras wrote. “In response to early reports that crime was dropping to record lows, the Trump administration has changed its tone and has begun touting the declines while crediting its policies.” Contreras concluded, “Experts aren’t sure why violent crime continues to fall.”

Another Axios article similarly dismissed the president’s role in decreasing crime, while admitting that homicides have fallen to a 125-year-low. “Trump touts himself as a law-and-order president who has tackled crime by sending National Guard troops into predominantly Democrat-run cities and justified his immigration crackdown by linking undocumented immigrants to rising crime,” wrote Axios author Josephine Walker. “But violent crime was already falling to a two-decade low in [former President Joe] Biden’s final year, calling into question whether Trump’s policies have made an impact.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt excoriated Axios for its reporting. “This ridiculous framing is why Americans don’t trust the media,” she said in a social media post linking to Contreras’s Axios article. “President Trump securing the border, mobilizing federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals, and deporting the worst of the worst illegal aliens is EXACTLY what’s driving the massive drop in crime.”

The White House released a press statement Wednesday, crediting the president’s policies for lowering crime rates nationwide. “After years of chaos, skyrocketing crime, and soft-on-crime policies under Biden plunged the nation’s biggest cities into anarchy and disorder, President Trump took office on a promise to restore public safety — and he has delivered in historic fashion,” the White House press release said, characterizing falling crime rates as “the direct result of President Trump’s aggressive, no-nonsense approach to public safety.” The press release continued, “By surging federal resources to Democrat-run cities that had devolved into war zones, removing savage criminal illegals from our streets, supporting police and prosecutors, and rejecting the Radical Left’s weakness, President Trump’s decisive actions have turned the tide, saved countless lives, and restored peace to communities long abandoned by Democrat politicians who prioritized criminals over citizens.”

Axios is not the only outlet on board the don’t-credit-Trump bandwagon. A CNN report claimed that “it’s nearly impossible to zero in on any one reason for why murders and other violent crime have dropped nationally in 2025,” but proceeded to credit “a combination of renewed precision policing tactics that have coupled with advancements in technology, along with preventative measures, such as violence interrupters and the court system getting through backlogs from the Covid-19 pandemic.” Time Magazine noted that the president has touted his policies as the driving force behind the plummeting crime rates, continuing, “Data shows, however, that there has been a steady decline in crime since a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that rates were already falling before Trump returned to office — including in cities the Administration has targeted in its immigration and crime crackdowns.”

“Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a role in this year’s drops,” the Associated Press suggested in its coverage. “However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report,” the renowned media outlet added. “What’s behind the staggering drop in the murder rate? No one knows for sure,” The New York Times stated, more bluntly. While the newspaper titan did admit that the president’s deployment of the National Guard yielded significantly lower crime rates in Washington, D.C., NYT authors Shaila Dewan and Lazaro Gamio wrote, “Experts said there is little to justify any claim that President Trump is responsible for last year’s drop in crime,” particularly dismissing the suggestion that the mass arrest and deportation of foreign criminals may have impacted crime rates.

In comments to The Washington Stand, CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan said, “It’s undeniable that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions are helping make our communities safer and contributing to lower crime rates.” She explained, “When you take 7,300 gang members off the streets, when you arrest tens of thousands of violent criminal aliens, when you attack and disrupt cartels and other transnational criminal organizations, homicides and other crimes are going to go down.” Vaughan continued, “Rather than report objectively on this achievement, establishment media organizations have instead sought to portray immigration enforcement as cruel, and to characterize ICE agents as overzealous and incompetent,” all while portraying illegal immigrants “as victims” and ignoring the actual “victims of criminal aliens.” Vaughan added, “Even migrant children who have been trafficked and abused are somehow victims of our laws, not commodities for human traffickers.”

Tim Graham, executive editor of Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, shared with TWS, “Our joke about the so-called objective press is they think good news is not news. Anything that sounds like Trump is accomplishing something cannot be credited to him. It’s somehow propaganda to claim he’s accomplished something.” Graham continued, “This is why we have consistently found that coverage of Trump on the evening newscasts is more than 90% negative. They don’t just accentuate the negative. They eliminate the positive.” He added, “We’ve just found the same with ICE. Coverage of ICE this year has been more than 90% negative. They demonize them nightly and call it a news product.”

ICE agents and the president’s immigration agenda have become targets for mainstream media hit jobs over the past year, particularly following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while interfering with federal operations in Minnesota last month. When two National Guard soldiers were shot by an Afghan national in D.C. in November, CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote that the president “used the moment to drive home his campaign against other migrants in politically charged remarks that went far beyond Afghanistan. … Trump lashed out at Somali immigrants in Minnesota, despite there being no apparent connection with the DC shooting.” Collinson added, “The full details of the incident in Washington are not yet known. But Trump’s comments were characteristic of a president who rarely waits for full clarity before engaging politically.”

A recent NBC News article claimed that “many Americans, including Republicans,” feel “discomfort” over the president’s deportation agenda and what the media outlet described as ICE’s “aggressive tactics,” while “fact-checking” an interview the president granted the outlet. The Economist classified ICE operations in Minnesota as an “assault on Minneapolis,” accusing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of “rushing” ICE recruits through hasty, slipshod training programs, resulting in “ill-trained” agents employing “excessive force.” The president was cast as an “authoritarian” and “strongman,” while ICE was dubbed Trump’s “personal posse.”

A New York Times article last month characterized immigration enforcement efforts as “targeting undocumented immigrants” and “stoking tensions between federal forces and residents” and “fear among residents, many of whom were afraid of leaving their homes.” The NYT article also questioned “how many” illegal immigrants arrested “had serious criminal histories” and described ICE tactics as “aggressive.” A NYT editorial article published Thursday accused ICE of embarking upon a “dark path” and acting in a “lawless” manner. “In enacting Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, officers from the department have repeatedly defied the Constitution. They have violated the First Amendment by trampling on citizens’ rights to speech and assembly,” the NYT Editorial Board wrote. “The department’s officers have pushed other federal laws to the breaking point and beyond, often ignoring judicial orders in the process.”

Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told TWS, “Results are always the best measure. Plummeting homicide rates is a fantastic news story. Rather than demonizing ICE agents,” she said, journalists and “politicians should acknowledge that arresting criminal aliens makes communities safer. Politicians and regular Americans should publicly thank ICE agents.”

During Trump’s first term, homicides largely remained below 17,000 per year, but violent crime rose during the summer of 2020, due in large part to the Black Lives Matter riots, and remained between 21,500 and 22,000 per year through much of Biden’s presidency, after he and then-Vice President Kamala Harris opened the nation’s border and ushered in roughly 12 million illegal immigrants.

“On the border, the media let Kamala and [DHS chief Alejandro] Mayorkas claim there was no border crisis,” Graham recalled of mainstream media outlets’ treatment of the Biden administration. “They suppressed the numbers of how many hundreds of thousands were swarming across the border. They ignored the deaths of Laken Riley and other women, the exact opposite of how they attempted to turn Renee Good into George Floyd,” he continued. “When Trump came in, the number of border encounters dramatically dropped within weeks. They’ve rarely cited that fact. So the average news consumer might presume he has no accomplishments.”