Trump’s violent deportation surge saw fewer killings by law enforcement | Opinion
Under President Donald Trump’s national mass deportation effort targeting undocumented immigrants, violence has been an inevitable part of the equation. The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good last month sparked national outrage and increasingly fierce protests in cities across the country.
But new data shows that as 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.
Progressive police reform group Campaign Zero publishes daily data at mappingpoliceviolence.org, including figures on killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. In 2025, their data shows 1,314 police killings compared to 1,382 in 2024 and 1,362 in 2023.
Indeed, in the month in which Pretti and Good were killed in 2026, police killings were down again compared to 2025.
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? Certainly, that’s not what I expected to happen. I don’t think anyone did.
Locally, the picture is mixed. In Kansas, where ICE launched raids in Lawrence on Tuesday, police killings were down slightly in 2025 to 11 compared to 12 in 2023 and 15 in 2024. In Missouri, police killings statewide were up for the second year, rising from 31 in 2023 to 33 in 2024 to 36 in 2025.
Though, the Trump administration has detained more undocumented immigrants without criminal records than the serious criminals he promised to target, ICE and the Border Patrol have still arrested and deported thousands of serious criminals.
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. Last year The New York Times and others used this same source to report the increase in police killings in the years since George Floyd’s death. Progressives were quick to decry those grim facts.
“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.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published February 18, 2026 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Trump’s violent deportation surge saw fewer killings by law enforcement | Opinion."
