In 2019, a historic theater’s marquee in McAllen’s downtown district once lauded, “Welcome to McAllen, 7th Safest city in America.”
The theater placed the message front and center ahead of a visit from President Donald Trump during his first term in office, using it to dispute the narrative at the time that the border was a dangerous place. The ranking itself came from a 2015 study by Smart Asset, a financial technology website.
Now, 10 years after that report, McAllen is highlighting its crime rate again — this time, celebrating its lowest crime levels in 40 years.
But McAllen is not unique. The decline in crime here is in line with a national and statewide trend that’s been ongoing for years.
Crime in Texas has been decreasing since 2023, according to Uniform Crime Reporting Data released by the Texas Department of Public Safety. In the last five years, crime in Texas peaked in 2022 — with a rate of 2,830.14 per 100,000 people — before trending downward.
Between 2022 and 2023, the state’s crime rate decreased by 3.3%, and between 2023 and 2024, the crime rate dropped another 8.2%. Then, between 2024 and 2025, Texas’ crime rate decreased by 13%.
McAllen, the second-largest city in the Rio Grande Valley with 151,000 people, reported a 21% drop in 2025. Brownsville, the Valley’s largest city with 193,000 people, also had a 21% drop in crime in 2025.
“We’ve been decreasing crime on a fairly consistent basis,” said McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez.
He credited the crime rate drop on the city’s population growth, an engaged community that reports potential crimes to the police and elected officials who prioritize public safety funding, enabling the department to maintain two officers per 1,000 people.
Rodriguez also suggested that heightened immigration enforcement under Trump’s second term may have played a role in driving down crime.
“That saturation of law enforcement authorities in this part of the country also help us, I think, maintain a lower crime rate in this part of the country, in this part of the state, and for McAllen as well,” Rodriguez said.
ICE presence might have played a role, but it might not have driven down crime as much as it could have created fear in reporting it. However, it is still too soon to know, experts said.
McAllen and the state of Texas are not outliers, but part of a broad national trend, said Alex del Carmen, a former criminologist with the Dallas Police Department and current dean at Westfield State University in Massachusetts.
Homicides across major U.S. cities fell by about 21% between 2024 and 2025 and are down 44% from the peak in 2021, del Carmen said.
“Texas is riding that same wave,” he said.
The declining crime rate occurred in places with and without active immigration enforcement, said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction.
“I haven’t seen any hard evidence that suggests that aggressive immigration enforcement has any effect on crime, positive or negative,” Abt said. “Part of it is that it’s too soon to know. It takes time for research to come out.”
However, research shows that immigrants are, on average, less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes, del Carmen and Abt said.
“That doesn’t mean that there aren’t immigrants out there who are engaged in crimes,” Abt said. “But if you look at immigrant populations, as a whole, you’ll see that they commit less offenses, and you’ll also see that cities that have higher populations of immigrants often have lower crime rates.”
Studies using Texas’ own arrest and conviction data, del Carmen said, consistently find that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are not responsible for the majority of the crimes that take place in the U.S.
Less reporting may be part of the drop
There is a legitimate concern that the decline in crime could be, at least partially, attributed to fear of reporting crimes among immigrant communities.
After the Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a program to identify immigrants in local jails in 2008, known as Secure Communities, Hispanic victims were about 30% less likely to report crimes to police. And that effect extended to citizens, not just the undocumented, del Carmen said.
More recently, he added, surveys of foreign-born Latinos found 16% have avoided calling police or reporting a crime for fear of being questioned about their legal status, and police chiefs in Los Angeles and Houston have publicly attributed drops in crime reports from Latino residents to deportation fear.
Still, fear of reporting cannot account for all of the decline as homicide numbers, which are less subject to reporting bias, are also going down.
The most serious offenses tend to be the most reliable because there is typically more evidence available, Abt said. If a homicide occurs, undeniable evidence typically comes with it which is the remains of the victim.
”We have extremely reliable data on how many homicides we have,” he said. “We also have fairly reliable data on serious assaults and shootings, because people have to go to the hospital, and we can access those records.”
On the other end of the spectrum, the number of shoplifting or drug offenses are largely a function of how much attention law enforcement is paying to those things.
An example of that is during the pandemic, there were reports and anecdotal evidence of a massive increase in shoplifting and disorder that didn’t ultimately show up in data.
“Does that mean that it didn’t happen or does it mean that a lot of stores were just so discouraged that they stopped reporting it?” he said.
Back to normal
Instead, the drop in crime rate could just be a return to normal following a spike in crime that occurred across the country in 2020 and 2021.
In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the closure of businesses and public gatherings could have created a recipe for social disruption. That was further fueled by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer, which prompted mass anti-police protests.
Additionally, Americans bought a record number of firearms in 2020, with first-time gun owners accounting for 40% of buyers
In the wake of the crime surge, Abt said there was a fractured view of criminal justice across the country, with many on the political right favoring aggressive law enforcement and many on the left wanting to de-emphasize or even defund the police.
“Neither of those extremes was particularly helpful,” Abt said.
What emerged, instead, was what he believed to be a more sensible approach. With the help of federal funding under President Joe Biden, cities returned to a balanced approach to fighting crime, investing in both law enforcement and in community groups.
“A more sensible center was created that said, ‘Look, we need cops, we need communities, and we need them to work together,’” he said.
In Texas specifically, del Carmen said, about 70% of statewide violent crime volume is concentrated in the most populated 25 jurisdictions. So when cities like Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas invest in hot-spot policing and violent crime reduction plans, the statewide numbers move.
“The honest answer is that no single actor gets to claim credit,” del Carmen said. “Declines this broad, occurring simultaneously in cities with very different policies, tell us structural and post-pandemic forces are doing much of the work.”
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Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.
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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
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