“Nobody knows nothin’.”
—Jack Bogle
The legendary Jack Bogle was referring to the financial market, but his sentiment also applies to crime statistics: Nobody really knows the actual crime rate — or who’s committing the crimes.
For about 10 years, I did PR for a fintech company that specialized in cybersecurity. You’d think online crimes would be the easiest to verify, but most of the crime stats were manufactured: We’d extrapolate data from Category A and project it to Category B.
They were almost always statistical projections.
Look, if we can’t accurately quantify crime stats in a closed ecosystem like cybersecurity, we don’t have a prayer of tabulating crime rates everywhere else. Too many variables.
This raises the question: What’s the true rate of illegal immigrant crime?
Nobody knows. Too many variables.
Some states explicitly prohibit the police from asking about or tracking the data. You also have the problem of unsolved crimes: If you don’t catch the perpetrator, you’ll never know who did it.
Furthermore, it’s reasonable to assume that someone who’s cagey enough (or well-connected enough) to illegally cross the border, live in the shadows, and evade authorities would likely be a more successful criminal than your Average Joe. And if illegal immigrants are targeting other illegal immigrants, that increases the probability of the victim staying silent — for very obvious reasons.
Perhaps illegal immigrant crime is extraordinarily underreported.
But every now and then, a state does make a good-faith effort to record the stats. Last year, Tennessee did.
21,648 total criminal charges [against illegal immigrants] in 2025
2,183 violent offenses
41 homicides
1,592 assaults
145 sexual offenses
11 child rapes
40 aggravated kidnappings
2,920 DUIs
5,318 cases of driving without a license or on suspended/or revoked
We still don’t know the actual illegal immigrant crime rate because we don’t know how many illegal immigrants are in Tennessee. Some studies estimate 186,000, but the God’s honest truth is, nobody knows for sure.
[I]f there are 186,000 illegal aliens in Tennessee and 21,648 criminal charges, that would come to one charge per every 8.6 illegal aliens. (The numbers aren’t perfect because some illegals were charged with multiple crimes, but this, alas, is about as close as we can get.)
Meanwhile, native-born Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 1,221 per 100,000, or just 1.22%.
Nor do we know for sure how many illegal immigrants are in the U.S. Estimates vary by the millions — a statistically significant differential. Let’s use Pew Research’s claim of 14 million.
Pew’s 14 million is about 75.3 times bigger than Tennessee’s 186,000. Which would imply — assuming Tennessee’s illegal immigrant crime stats aren’t unusually high or low — that the national crime stats for illegal immigrants are approximately:
1,630,094 total criminal charges in 2025
164,380 violent offenses
3,087 homicides
119,877 assaults
10,918 sexual offenses
828 child rapes
3,012 aggravated kidnappings
219,876 DUIs
400,445 cases of driving without a license or on suspended/or revoked
Are those numbers too high? Too low?
Or dead accurate?
Probably too high: There are roughly 23,000 homicides in the U.S. each year. It seems unlikely that illegal aliens are responsible for 1 in 7.5 homicides.
But then again, less than half of all homicides are ever solved. So you can’t rule it out either because nobody knows the answer.
What we do know is that two events converged: President Donald Trump’s unprecedented crackdown on illegal immigration and the national crime rate dropping to its lowest levels in 100 years.
Murders fell 21% last year in 35 large U.S. cities — the biggest one-year drop ever and likely the lowest rate since 1900, Axios-reviewed data shows.
Why it matters: The decline signals a complete reversal of the COVID-era crime wave.
If our hypothesis is that illegal immigrant crime is being dramatically underreported, it would be logical to assume that a crackdown on illegal immigrants and/or border crossings would coincide with a drop in crime. Limiting one should limit the other.
The Trump administration claimed that more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants left the country last year.
So roughly 18% of illegal immigrants left the country — and the murder rate dropped by 21%.
Coincidence?
Or is this EXACTLY what you’d expect, especially if illegal immigrants commit crimes at a disproportionately higher rate?
The truth is, even today, nobody knows nothin’. It could be one thing; it could be a combination of things. Like Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
But a clearer, gloomier picture is rapidly emerging: Illegal immigrant crime was almost certainly a far greater threat to our safety than we were told.
Otherwise, the correlation of a crackdown on illegal immigration — and the national crime rate hitting a 100-year low — was one helluva weird, inexplicable coincidence.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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