The White House is trying to mislead Americans about President Donald Trump’s impact on crime rates—but the numbers aren’t adding up.
Last month, the White House touted a mid-year report from the Council on Criminal Justice as evidence of Trump’s public safety policies working to reduce crime. But a closer look at the report found that it doesn’t actually support the administration’s claims, NOTUS reported Thursday.
In a press release published on July 29, the White House claimed that the four cities that saw the steepest drop in homicides in the first six months of the year were Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Memphis, and New Orleans—four cities where Trump deployed National Guard troops and federal agency officials “after Democrat leaders failed to act.”
But those cities didn’t see the steepest drops in homicides—and some of them weren’t even included in the original CCJ report.
In reality, the cities that saw the biggest drops were Lincoln, Nebraska; Rochester, New York; and Little Rock, Arkansas. Washington saw the sixth steepest decline, and Los Angeles saw the seventeenth. Meanwhile, Memphis and New Orleans weren’t even mentioned in the CCJ report.
The White House cited a separate article to support its claim about Memphis and New Orleans, but the author of that piece told NOTUS that the White House’s statement was “incorrect.”
Following a request for comment from NOTUS, the White House published yet another press release Tuesday featuring completely different statistics. This time, the Trump administration claimed that Washington and Memphis had seen the ninth and tenth largest drops in homicide, according to Axios’s analysis of a survey from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
Neither report suggested that the downward trend in national homicide rates—which began in 2022—has anything to do with Trump’s policies.
The Trump administration has continually fudged the numbers on the president’s public safety record in order to manufacture consent for a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that continue to tear apart families and trample on human rights. But the real crime numbers don’t support his federal takeover of American cities. For example, homicide rates in Minneapolis, which was flooded by ICE agents this past winter as a part of Operation Metro Surge, were higher in the first half of 2026 than they were in 2019, according to the CCJ report.
Experts have suggested that several factors could be responsible for the change, but many pointed to significant investments in community violence intervention following the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the current administration has cut more than half of federal funding for gun violence prevention from the Department of Justice.
The Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on airplanes that were supposed to be used for deportation flights, but instead have been sitting mostly unused at an airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
The New York Times reports that the 10 used jets, which were purchased through a no-bid contract with a northern Virginia business with ties to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have barely been used. Seven of the planes, older Boeing 737s, aren’t being used because DHS doesn’t have the staff to operate them, the Times reports, citing an internal government document.
Three of the plans are luxury business jets, and DHS has sought to lease or loan two of them to other agencies, including one of them to the FBI for use by Director Kash Patel, the agency said in a letter to Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The firm that got the contract for the planes is Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose chairman donated to a political action committee headed by Noem. But DHS may not have needed the planes in the first place, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a history of using planes chartered from private companies for deportation flights, as well as military and Coast Guard jets.
Former acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement John Sandweg, who served under the Obama administration, told the Times that “if you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten.”
