In 2019, a historic theater\u2019s marquee in McAllen\u2019s downtown district once lauded, \u201cWelcome to McAllen, 7th Safest city in America.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, 10 years after that report, McAllen is highlighting its crime rate again \u2014 this time, celebrating its lowest crime levels in 40 years.<\/p>\n
But McAllen is not unique. The decline in crime here is in line with a national and statewide trend that\u2019s been ongoing for years.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 with a rate of 2,830.14 per 100,000 people \u2014 before trending downward.<\/p>\n
Between 2022 and 2023, the state\u2019s crime rate decreased by 3.3%, and between 2023 and 2024, the crime rate dropped another 8.2%. Then, between 2024 and 2025, Texas\u2019 crime rate decreased by 13%.<\/p>\n
McAllen, the second-largest city in the Rio Grande Valley with 151,000 people, reported a 21% drop in 2025. Brownsville, the Valley\u2019s largest city with 193,000 people, also had a 21% drop in crime in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been decreasing crime on a fairly consistent basis,\u201d said McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez.<\/p>\n
He credited the crime rate drop on the city\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Rodriguez also suggested that heightened immigration enforcement under Trump\u2019s second term may have played a role in driving down crime.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat 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,\u201d Rodriguez said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cTexas is riding that same wave,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t seen any hard evidence that suggests that aggressive immigration enforcement has any effect on crime, positive or negative,\u201d Abt said. \u201cPart of it is that it\u2019s too soon to know. It takes time for research to come out.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, research shows that immigrants are, on average, less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes, del Carmen and Abt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t immigrants out there who are engaged in crimes,\u201d Abt said. \u201cBut if you look at immigrant populations, as a whole, you\u2019ll see that they commit less offenses, and you\u2019ll also see that cities that have higher populations of immigrants often have lower crime rates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studies using Texas\u2019 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.
\nLess reporting may be part of the drop<\/p>\n
There is a legitimate concern that the decline in crime could be, at least partially, attributed to fear of reporting crimes among immigrant communities.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201dWe have extremely reliable data on how many homicides we have,\u201d he said. \u201cWe also have fairly reliable data on serious assaults and shootings, because people have to go to the hospital, and we can access those records.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
An example of that is during the pandemic, there were reports and anecdotal evidence of a massive increase in shoplifting and disorder that didn\u2019t ultimately show up in data.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes that mean that it didn\u2019t happen or does it mean that a lot of stores were just so discouraged that they stopped reporting it?\u201d he said.
\nBack to normal<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Americans bought a record number of firearms in 2020, with first-time gun owners accounting for 40% of buyers<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNeither of those extremes was particularly helpful,\u201d Abt said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cA more sensible center was created that said, \u2018Look, we need cops, we need communities, and we need them to work together,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe honest answer is that no single actor gets to claim credit,\u201d del Carmen said. \u201cDeclines this broad, occurring simultaneously in cities with very different policies, tell us structural and post-pandemic forces are doing much of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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