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One year after critics warned President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push would spark bloodshed in America’s largest sanctuary cities, new data from a leading progressive police-reform group shows police-involved killings actually declined — the first drop in five years.
Lawmakers and activists from Los Angeles to New York predicted that Trump’s surge into largely sanctuary-city communities would lead to more violence against innocent residents, which recently reached a fever pitch with the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
However, data from progressive advocacy project Mapping Police Violence, a subsidiary of the Harlem-based Campaign Zero police reform group, found that police-involved killings actually went down in that timespan.
In its police violence report for 2025, the 1,314 police-involved killings marked a decline for the first time in five years.
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A man waves a U.S. flag next to people protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement near the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Jan. 9, 2026. (CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2024, that figure was 1,382, reportedly a record high, and in 2023, 1,362 people died at the hands of police, whether justified or otherwise.
“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,” wrote columnist David Mastio in the Kansas City Star.
“These facts complicate the political narrative that Trump has unleashed ‘violent and sometimes deadly tactics … by federal immigration officers in communities across the country’.”
Mastio also pointed out that recent complaints from the left about an uptick in police-involved violence since George Floyd’s death in the Twin Cities left out the detail that any increase would have occurred under a Democratic administration in Washington.
During the immigration enforcement surge in Los Angeles, Sen. Alex Padilla told PBS that the situation is a “crisis of Trump’s own making” and voiced concern over the repercussions of any violence.
Padilla, D-Calif., famously appeared to try to accost Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem when he barged into a press conference during the surge — a claim the senator denied after he was briefly detained by security.
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President Donald Trump, left, and a police car, right. (Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement during the height of the Minneapolis surge that people were being “racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted. Schools have gone into lockdown.”
“Minneapolis didn’t ask for this operation, but we’re paying the price,” claimed Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her expressed concerns that violence indeed would increase against innocent people as DHS honed in on his metro region.
“Our residents are scared, and as local officials, we have a responsibility to act. Today we’re standing side by side with Minneapolis and the attorney general to fight back,” Her said.
In his column, Mastio noted that the latest figures come from an “unimpeachable ‘defund-the-police’ source” that would not “gift” credible data to its ideological opponents.
Meanwhile, DHS has routinely highlighted data showing that it is violence against law enforcement that is up.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin recently told Fox News Digital of a four-figure percentage increase in threats against ICE and federal immigration officers.
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“Our ICE law enforcement officers are now facing an 8,000% increase in death threats against them and a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them while they risk their lives every single day to remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, terrorists, and gang members from American neighborhoods,” McLaughlin said.
“Make no mistake, threatening rhetoric and this unprecedented violence against our law enforcement is incited by sanctuary politicians through their repeated vilification and demonization of law enforcement.”
