Trump’s federal enforcement spending in the billions is justified on public safety grounds, and a new study shows the evidence contradicts that justification. Enforcement actually targets the population that the data identifies as victims.

Check out Kubrin, Christopher, Hodgen, Luo, and Hipp, “Does unauthorized immigration drive community crime rates? Evidence from 11,500 U.S. neighborhoods,” Journal of Urban Affairs, DOI 10.1080/07352166.2026.2699123.

The study tracked crime across 11,500 neighborhoods covering 46 million residents in U.S. cities from 2010 to 2018, the first to test the unauthorized immigration and crime relationship at the neighborhood level at national scale. Neighborhoods where the undocumented share grew saw larger reductions in property crime and flat violent crime.

I’ll say it again. Undocumented immigrants correlate to a drop in property crime and violent crime rates held flat. This is especially notable because the property crime that actually goes down when undocumented immigrants increase in number sits alongside the violent crime the Trump administration harps loudest about, which held flat.

There’s also a notable exception inside that flat violent crime aggregate. Robbery rose while every other category fell, and the authors identify undocumented immigrants as its likely victims. The authors mention undocumented residents are disproportionately targeted for robbery given their heavier participation in the cash economy. They call this a Walking ATM phenomenon: cash carriage from exclusion out of banking, plus underreporting driven by deportation fear. The data lacks robbery victim immigration status, so their victimization analysis is inference, based on the pattern across other categories.

Prior national tests of this question ran at the state and metro aggregation, while the far finer census tract at national scale is the unit being published now.