Trump blames ‘sanctuary’ policies for crime in Chicago, but the numbers don’t add up

After President Donald Trump federalized the Washington, D.C., police department and deployed National Guard troops there to fight violent crime, he promised Chicago would be next.

“Chicago is a mess,” Trump told reporters in August. “Chicago is very dangerous.”

Weeks later, the Department of Homeland Security launched “Operation Midway Blitz” to “target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew [Illinois] Governor [JB] Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets.”

The Trump administration says the presence of undocumented immigrants with criminal records justifies the need for hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops to tamp down what his team characterizes as runaway violent crime here. But a WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times analysis reveals a different picture.

Our analysis found Democrat-led cities and states — like Chicago and Illinois — have lower rates of murder and overall violent crime than Republican-led cities and states. The same is true for the growth of undocumented immigrant populations and rates of undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Yet GOP-controlled states have escaped the aggressive deportation operations the feds are carrying out in Democrat-run states.

‘Chicago’s got a lot of murders’

As federal agents patrolled downtown Chicago in late September — with protesters shouting “ICE go home” — U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino told WBEZ that most of the city’s residents supported his troops and Chicago needed the help.

“The threat remains in the United States,” Bovino said. “Chicago’s got a lot of murders. We’re going to make the city a safer place.”

But the numbers show that other cities in red states are more dangerous. For instance, St. Louis, Memphis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Atlanta all have higher murder rates than Chicago.

Fourteen big-city police agencies reported higher murder rates than Chicago during a one-year period ending June 30. Seven are in states led by Republican governors and six are in states with Democratic governors. The remaining agency was in Washington, D.C., led by a Democratic mayor.

Among the five cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland and Washington — where the Trump administration has sought to deploy National Guard troops, Memphis is the only one in a state led by a Republican governor.

Memphis had the highest violent crime rate and second-highest murder rate in the nation among 145 police agencies serving areas with populations of 250,000 or more.

Illinois’ murder rate ranked 13th among the 50 states. Nine of the 12 states with higher murder rates are led by Republican governors.

Collectively, police agencies in states led by Republican governors recorded a murder rate nearly 32% higher than police agencies in states led by Democratic governors.

WBEZ has reported that Chicago this year saw its fewest summer murders since 1965 — even as Trump continually slammed the city’s crime.

‘It’s a fiction’

Trump casts blue states as havens for undocumented immigrants. He derides the “sanctuary” laws that many of these states have enacted to stop police from assisting federal deportation efforts.

But states led by Republicans have seen their undocumented immigrant populations grow faster.

Red states also have higher percentages of ICE detainees with criminal backgrounds than their Democratic counterparts. That could be due to the refusal of some blue states, including Illinois, to cooperate with federal efforts to locate undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

From 2019 to 2023, the estimated number of undocumented immigrants across the country grew from 10.2 million to 14.0 million, according to the Pew Research Center.

But the growth rate was higher in Republican-led states — about 41% — compared with Democratic-led states at about 30%, the WBEZ and Sun-Times analysis shows.

From 2019 through 2023, Florida and Texas, led by Republican governors, saw the biggest raw increases in undocumented immigrants, with jumps of 750,000 and 450,000, respectively, according to Pew estimates.

Florida and Texas together account for nearly a third of the nation’s overall growth in undocumented immigrants during the five years.

That’s despite efforts by those two states to transport Venezuelan immigrants to Illinois and other blue states starting in 2022. By the end of 2024, more than 51,000 asylum seekers, many from Venezuela, had arrived in Chicago from Texas, according to a city data dashboard.

Chicago leaders struggled to accommodate the migrants, who slept on the floors of airports and police stations for months until the city could open temporary shelters and provide other housing options.

Some of those same immigrants are now getting deported in Trump’s blitz.

The Trump administration says immigrants with criminal pasts are drawn to sanctuary cities and states, but that isn’t supported by data on ICE arrests.

The data show more than 132,000 immigrants with prior convictions were arrested by ICE across the country between Sept.1, 2023 and July 28, 2025.

Nearly two-thirds of them were apprehended in states with Republican governors, according to data shared by the Deportation Data Project.

According to Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigration Justice Center,

massive deportation efforts have always conflated criminality with immigration.

“It’s a fiction,” Fleming says. “It is a tiny fraction of the population that has any serious criminal record that they are detaining this year. Their own statistics don’t line up with their rhetoric.”

Police leaders too understand the undocumented immigrant population in the United States isn’t full of criminals.

“There is considerable support among police chiefs for identifying violent offenders who are here illegally,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank for law enforcement leaders. “But there is less support for arresting those who have worked in this country for 20 years” without committing serious crimes.

But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem doesn’t differentiate between people with violent backgrounds and people who are merely immigration violators. She says all of them are criminals, so all of them are subject to arrest and removal.

At a news conference in Gary on Oct. 30, she repeated that undocumented immigrants can choose to “self-deport” and receive $1,000 from the U.S. government. Or, she says, they will be arrested, removed and prohibited from coming back.The goal of Trump’s “Midway Blitz” is to reduce violent crime in Chicago.

But one academic paper published last year said heightened immigration enforcement doesn’t change crime rates.

Researchers studied the U.S. Secure Communities program, which expanded interior enforcement against unauthorized immigrants.

“Using national survey data, we find that the program reduced the likelihood that Hispanic victims reported crimes to police and increased the victimization of Hispanics. Total reported crimes are unchanged, masking these opposing effects,” said the researchers, who are from Northwestern University, the University of California and UCLA.

“We provide evidence that reduced Hispanic reporting is the key driver of increased victimization. Our findings underscore the importance of trust in institutions as a central determinant of public safety.“

As Trump’s “Midway Blitz” continues, his administration says about 3,000 people have been arrested on immigration charges in the operation since the deportation campaign began in September. But that figure can’t be independently verified because of a lack of public records.

About 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and another 300 from the Illinois National Guard have been stationed in the Chicago area since early October but a federal judge and an appellate court have temporarily blocked their deployment.

The administration also sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles in Democrat-led California in June and to Portland in Democrat-led Oregon in September.

Tennessee is the only Republican-led state where National Guard troops have been deployed. They arrived in Memphis a few weeks ago.