“While the administration stokes fear about Afghan immigrants, data paint another picture. A 2019 study from the Cato Institute showed that the incarceration rate for Afghans between 18 and 54 was 127 per 100,000, a stark comparison to the 1,477 per 100,000 for native-born Americans.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported that, according to a 2024 Department of Health and Human Services study, refugees brought a $123.8 billion net fiscal benefit to the U.S. between 2005 and 2019, contributing $581 billion in taxes while receiving $457.1 billion in government support. This combats the Trump administration’s objections based on the net cost of admitting refugees to the U.S.
While refugees’ earnings may be limited on arrival, IRC says they “increase significantly” with time. A median household income of $30,500 in a refugee’s first five years in the U.S. becomes a median income of $71,400 after being here for 20 years. That number exceeds the national median income by nearly $4,000.
IRC also reported that more refugees become entrepreneurs (13 percent) than their U.S.-born counterparts (9 percent), benefitting their communities.
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The administration is using an isolated act of violence to justify sweeping crackdowns on refugees and wartime allies who were already thoroughly vetted.”
The overwhelming share of shootings in the US are from arguments. They aren’t from people committing a crime, or people murdering for revenge, they are from heated arguments, and in the moment of escalation, someone shoots someone else.
Wealthy areas have much less shootings, but even between neighborhoods with similar socio-demographics, there are some with high shootings and some with low shootings.
Experiments that involve cleaning up vacant lots in neighborhoods, and teaching men how to respond to provocation, have found drastic reductions in violence.
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”
Although crime in DC has been down, it has still been very bad. The streets are quieter since the Feds came to town, but this isn’t a long term solution. Some residents are living in fear of the Feds, especially Hispanics, including ones here legally because the Feds will arrest people they falsely suspect are illegal.
“The president deployed nearly 2,000 law enforcement officers into a city supposedly teeming with criminals. And yet the effort netted some 380 arrests in 10 days, and many of the charges the administration has bragged about are for low-level nonviolent offenses, such as possession of narcotics or carrying a pistol without a license.”
“Trump’s comments came in response to questions about the assault of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old man known as “big balls” who played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to slash government under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration though Musk has left the government and DOGE has been scaled back, told police he was attacked by a group of juveniles as part of an apparent attempted carjacking about 3 a.m Sunday in Northwest D.C.”
“Texas already has several mechanisms to use in coaxing the Democrats back. Each day they’re gone, the fleeing Democrats incur a $500-per-day fine. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also released an order for their arrest by the Texas Department of Public Safety, describing the Democrats’ conduct as “abandonment or forfeiture.” Republicans in the Texas House, meanwhile, have issued arrest warrants for the absent Democrats, and Attorney General Ken Paxton—who is challenging Cornyn in his re-election bid—has called for their removal from office.
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Regardless of how involved the FBI will become, the bureau’s involvement at all degrades the principle of federalism by infringing upon Texas’s authority to discipline its lawmakers. It is also the most recent example of the Trump Justice Department being weaponized for political gain and tasked with duties outside its standard wheelhouse.
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Though Patel dismissed concerns during his confirmation hearing that he would weaponize the FBI, he seems to have set his sights on the Texas Democrats, despite Trump’s Day One executive order to end the “weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
While the Democrats’ plan is an attempt to circumvent a vote, they’ve broken no federal laws or statutes. There is simply no need for the FBI’s involvement.”
“I’m hugely in favor of stopping violent crime, but using federal agents to get the job done—and perhaps more worryingly, having the president direct how minors are charged—is likely to get into sticky territory rather quickly. “Because D.C. is not a state, the federal government has unique authority to exert control over city affairs—even amid objections from the residents and locally elected government,” notes The Washington Post. “The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave D.C. residents the ability to elect their own mayor and council members. A federal takeover of the D.C. police force would be an extraordinary assertion of power in a place where local leaders have few avenues to resist federal encroachment.””
“Trump does have the power to oversee what happens in D.C. because of its unique role as home to the nation’s seat of government. The law gives the president the power to temporarily take over the city’s law enforcement operations.
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The president’s description of crime in Washington, D.C., is not reflected in official statistics, which show that the city had its lowest violent crime rate in over 30 years in 2024.”
“”What’s interesting about crime in DC is that there’s three very distinct problems,” writes Reason’s Robby Soave, who lives there. “One is semi-professional gang crime, mostly confined to sketchy neighborhoods, that usually targets other gang members. This is the kind of crime every large city has, and is counteracted by spending more money on homicide detectives and then aggressively prosecuting illegal firearms violators.”
“Then there’s mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people setting up tent cities,” he continues, noting that the most egregiously large and disorderly encampments were cleaned up. “Lastly, there are large groups of teenagers rampaging through otherwise fairly nice and affluent areas, assaulting people and stealing cars, and also getting into fights with each other. Seems to be driven by a mix of post-pandemic societal collapse, trends in youth behavior, and insufficient action by authorities. It’s here where a more robust police presence might do the most good.” It’s this third group that news reports are mostly fixating on, the group responsible for the Big Balls assault and that has caught Trump’s attention.”
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Crime is down, and, “though the decrease is laudable, this is in part because crime and disorder were rampant during the pandemic. It has taken years for it to come down to seminormal rates, and those “normal rates” aren’t even that good: “The murder rate at the end of 2024 was, per Asher’s data, lower than 2023, but still about 70 percent higher than that of a decade prior. And although carjackings are down, they’re still elevated over pre-2020.” But lots of crime data is unfortunately easy to manipulate, and novel approaches by new entrants—young people engaged in serious property crime and assaults in previously safe areas—are surely worth stamping out as they emerge.
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a ton of D.C.’s criminal justice system is already under the federal government’s control, and the feds are doing a rather poor job managing it. “That starts with the US attorney’s office, which, unlike a normal federal prosecutor’s office, also does the job of a district attorney and prosecutes local crimes. More significantly, the basic local trial court—the DC Superior Court—is technically a federal court whose members need to be confirmed by the Senate. Senate majority leaders, understandably, are normally not that fired up about local trial courts in DC, and they don’t like to spend floor time on these confirmations.” A high vacancy rate (roughly 20 percent) is the result, which means people in need of punishment don’t receive it so swiftly.
The federal government also handles pretrial supervision for people who’ve been arrested and are awaiting full court proceedings, adds Yglesias, but the agencies handling this can’t seem to figure out how to do their damn jobs: The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, in 2023, “had 2,120 offenders on ‘maximum supervision level’ but only 490 outfitted with GPS monitors,” for example, per Politico. And when a pretrial release of a man accused of shooting 26 rounds from an AR-15 at a car made the rounds on the news, the Pretrial Services Agency came under intense scrutiny, with prosecutors writing in a legal filing that “while GPS monitoring by the vendor may be in real time, PSA’s monitoring of defendants is not. PSA only works during normal business hours. Therefore, PSA only finds out about violations that occur at night or on weekends after the fact.” (When would you guess that the majority of violations occur?)
Trump, of course, is not focused on the unsexy work detailed above, which could meaningfully impact which criminals get locked up and how quickly, who gets leniency and who gets surveilled and confined.”