Giovanna Perez loaded her four kids into the car on September 21 and drove from their home in Weslaco, Texas, to Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. She had a 9:30 a.m. appointment to pick up the ID cards that would allow them to access military medical insurance, facilities, and commissary stores. Her husband, Pedro Gutierrez, had recently enlisted in the Army and left a month earlier for basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

Perez approached the military guards at the gates with some trepidation. Her parents illegally brought her across the U.S. border from Mexico when she was 6 years old. Now 35, she and Gutierrez have been together since they were 17 and have carefully kept her immigration status a secret. Gutierrez is a U.S. citizen, but marriage does not give legal status to someone who is in the country unlawfully. When the Obama administration started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect immigrants like Perez who had arrived as children, she did not apply, for fear that the government might someday use the information against her family.

Perez told us that her husband believed that joining the Army would allow him to serve his country, give his family access to health care—including the costly medications his son takes—and potentially protect his wife from deportation. He had already submitted her application for a benefit called Parole in Place, which offers a path to legal residency for the close relatives of service members. Officials at Fort Benning had assured him that she would have no trouble getting IDs for herself and the children, and that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a Social Security number, Perez told us.

At the gates of the Navy base, guards told Perez they had no record of her appointment. She remained calm as they directed her to a nearby office to get a visitor’s pass. That’s when two military officials took the family into a room for questioning. “In my head, I thought it was just protocol for the safety of the base, but it started getting weird,” Perez said. As she answered, she told us, one of the military officers appeared to be relaying her responses to someone through text messages.

Two other men entered the room. They wore khaki pants, she said, not military fatigues. The patches on their shirts said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It appeared to Perez that they’d been waiting for her, at the base or somewhere nearby. The men told Perez to report to the ICE office in Harlingen, Texas, in three days. Her older children, ages 17, 15, and 11, were confused. “My kids were just, like, What’s going on?” Perez told us. “Are they gonna detain you? Why are they doing this to us? I thought you were supposed to be safe.”

Perez didn’t know what to tell them, and she had no way to call her husband. When she went to the ICE office three days later, she was booked and issued an order to appear in immigration court. She suspected the military shared her information with ICE. And now the government was trying to deport her.

Perez’s attorney, Alex Martinez, told us he’s trying to determine whether other families have been targeted in similar ways. He suspects that the government has been using Parole in Place to gather information for immigration-enforcement purposes—the opposite of what military recruits are led to believe.

“There’s no bigger betrayal to our soldiers than to use their trust in a program, set out by our government to protect their families, and ultimately use it to destroy their families while they’re serving our country and putting their lives on the line,” Martinez told us. “You’re stabbing your own soldiers in the back.”

The Associated Press in August identified at least 50 cases in which close family of active-duty service members were arrested by ICE. What’s different about Perez’s case is that U.S. military personnel appeared to be working with ICE to identify a potential target and use a long-standing military-recruitment tool—the promise of legal status for loved ones—to facilitate an arrest.

ICE confirmed to us in a statement that Navy personnel had reported Perez to immigration officers when the family arrived at the base. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE “value the contributions of all those who serve in the U.S. military,” the statement said. “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws. Military service by an immediate relative does not automatically grant parole, lawful status, or immunity from immigration enforcement."

Perez told us the ICE officers seemed to be expecting her, told her they knew that Gutierrez had applied for Parole in Place, and asked questions about a trip her son had taken with his grandmother to Mexico years earlier.

Neither the Army nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense responded to requests for comment, but one defense official told us that there have been “varying degrees of cooperation between military installations and the Department of Homeland Security” for more than a year. The official declined to be named because he, like others we spoke with, was not authorized to talk publicly about this issue. Another official told us that DHS often made such requests to installations at a local level, but there were inconsistent degrees of cooperation. The Navy declined to comment.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

Within months of President Trump’s second inauguration, military mental-health specialists began telling us that service members within their units were fearful about how the administration’s crackdown on immigrants could affect their families. They described spouses afraid to go on base while their partner was deployed, family members too scared to leave their home, and uniformed service members accompanying loved ones to immigration appointments or hearings with the hope that their presence would make immigration officials or judges pause. Such worries, the specialists said, were becoming a distraction for those serving, particularly during deployments. It was an early sign of a break in a long-standing bargain: A government that asks Americans to take extraordinary risks would not add stress that could distract service members from their missions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frequently touts the military’s surging recruitment numbers. Less often mentioned is the military’s success in recruiting from some of the country’s most heavily Hispanic communities, including the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where Perez and Gutierrez live. Hispanic recruits accounted for nearly 27 percent of new Army soldiers last year, up from just less than 20 percent in 2020, according to Army statistics. This population remains key to the Army meeting its recruiting standards even as service members from these communities have reported that their families have been targeted by ICE.

Military law enforcement cannot provide direct support to civilian law enforcement, under the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law that was intended to keep the military from meddling in the affairs of southern states. But to secure an installation, military police can inspect those who enter. “Anytime somebody makes an appointment on a military base, that information could get shared throughout the federal government,” Margaret D. Stock, an immigration lawyer and former Army Reserve officer who helped develop the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program, told us. Under the Trump administration, those who serve, along with their families, are no more protected from immigration enforcement than those submitting their data to any other government agency. “The military is no longer immune from this,” Stock said. Some troops are asking for overseas assignments where they can live with their family members, far from ICE agents.

In April, ICE officers arrested the 22-year-old wife of a U.S. soldier when the couple moved to an Army base in Louisiana. The woman, Annie Ramos, was born in Honduras and had a previous deportation order issued in absentia when she was a toddler. Ramos was released after Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Democrat, spoke with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on her behalf.

Bobby Pulido, a Democratic candidate in the Rio Grande Valley who is running for Congress, has cited her case as an example of ICE overreach by the Trump administration. “The scary part is they’re doubling down on it. They don’t care,” Pulido said in a video clip with Perez that his campaign posted on social media on Wednesday.

It used to be that the military was seen as a potential pathway to U.S. citizenship. Military service can qualify noncitizens for expedited naturalization, and the Pentagon has at times recruited people who were not permanent residents. More than 180,000 members of the U.S. military have become naturalized citizens since 2002, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2008, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched the MAVNI program, which allowed some immigrants who were living legally in the U.S. but were not citizens to enlist based on specialized skills considered vital, including medical expertise and foreign-language proficiency. The program expired in 2017 and was not renewed. The government established the Parole in Place benefit in 2010, allowing family members to remain in the United States and apply for legal status. Approval is discretionary and does not guarantee a green card. But the promise remains a powerful recruiting tool for the armed services in immigrant communities.

[Read: The northern passage]

Perez said she has no criminal record and no previous deportation orders. She met her husband at a quinceañera party when they were teenagers in Laredo. Gutierrez drove commercial trucks but decided to enlist in the Army to secure health-insurance coverage for the family and college-tuition aid for their older children. Fixing Perez’s immigration status was another incentive for him, she told us.

It was in a 20-minute weekend phone call that Gutierrez learned the country he was serving had been trying to deport his wife and separate his family. Had Perez been sent to a detention center, as many immigrants are, Gutierrez would have been forced to leave basic training to care for his children—a governmental loss of not just a new service member but also roughly $50,000 in sunk training costs, according to Army estimates. Perez stays home to take care of their 2-year-old, and she told us she has no idea what would happen to her children if ICE sent her to Mexico. “I have no one,” she said. “I’m by myself.”

Her husband will graduate from basic training on November 5, and Perez and her children plan to drive to Georgia for the ceremony at Fort Benning. They were issued their military IDs, so they should be allowed onto the base. Perez told us that she’s in a discussion group with other military families who are asking a lot of questions about who will be allowed to attend the graduation. Five days after the ceremony, Perez will be due back in court in Texas.

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President Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.

“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.

ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)

Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.

Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to federal data analyzed by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. But FBI and census data rank Georgia 33rd in the violent-crime-rate reduction. Virginia, which has also consistently been in the top 10 for ICE arrests over the past year, is 34th among states in falling violent-crime rates. And although Florida consistently has had the second- or third-highest number of monthly ICE arrests over the past year, it was 18th among states for its violent-crime-rate drop.

To be sure, there are cities with relatively high numbers of ICE arrests that have reported significant declines in violent crime, including Houston, Memphis, and Nashville. But the most recent federal data do not show cause and effect, let alone a clear correlation. In New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles—all sanctuary cities—the murder rate is the lowest in at least a half century.

[Read: The man in charge of immigration data just resigned]

The Department of Homeland Security told us that a comparison of state-level ICE-arrest volumes and year-over-year violent-crime-count changes is improper, but did not provide evidence for the president’s own cause-and-effect claims tying the two together. “It’s common sense: when you remove illegal aliens off our streets, the violent U.S. crime rate DROPS,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “President Trump is making America safe again.”   

The number of homicides and other violent crimes began falling in the 1990s. It spiked during the pandemic, then resumed a downward path during Joe Biden’s presidency. Elisa Jácome, an economist at Northwestern University who has studied the effects of immigration enforcement on crime, told us that although it’s easy for politicians to try to claim credit for the reduction, “it’s actually quite difficult to separate those claims from the underlying trends, which are very real.”

The declining violent-crime trend is also real in countries where Trump is not president and there’s no mass-deportation campaign. Canada’s homicide rate fell 16 percent from 2024 to 2025, the biggest one-year drop in 40 years, according to a July 2026 report by the Canadian government. Homicides in England and Wales are at a nearly 50-year low, according to British government data, amid a historic influx of immigrants.

Trump’s claims about crime and immigrants have been his calling card ever since he first ran for office, more than a decade ago. As his party potentially faces the loss of its congressional majority in November, he and top law-enforcement officials have been trying to fire up the MAGA faithful with the messaging that helped Republicans gain control of the House in the 2022 midterms.

The president made his law-and-order pitch during a visit in August to a police academy on Long Island, where he campaigned for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is expected to easily win the race. Using rows of uniformed police officers and cadets as a backdrop, Trump mocked the state’s Democratic leaders and told the crowd the White House was full of “young, beautiful girls” who “want to be safe” while working in the nation’s capital.

Republicans in tight races have been less eager to embrace Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican whose Miami district has been roiled by immigration enforcement, released a video message last month telling Trump that ICE was picking up too many non-criminals. Other Republicans who have tried to distance themselves from the White House’s aggressive approach include Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, where ICE has been raiding meatpacking plants. Trump won the state by 16 percentage points in 2024, but the latest polls show Marshall in a tight race with the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton, who says families are “living in fear” of ICE.

Even longtime proponents of the president’s immigration agenda have rescinded their support. In 2017, then-Governor of Maine Paul LePage applauded Trump for signing an executive order banning immigrants from many Muslim-majority countries, saying he was in full support of Trump’s “action to protect all Americans.” But last week, LePage, who is now running for a House seat, announced at a news conference that his son’s father-in-law is being deported. Even though he came to the United States legally and has a work permit, “he came from a country that’s not the liking to certain people in Washington,” LePage said, without naming the country. “That’s not right.”

[From the November 2026 issue: The babies left behind in America]

Administration officials have claimed that upwards of 65 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE have a criminal record. But even among those with convictions or pending charges, most offenses are nonviolent, Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, told us. (In July, less than 4 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE had a past violent-crime conviction, according to an analysis by The New York Times.) In August, Kubrin released a study on changing crime rates and unauthorized-immigrant populations across nearly 12,000 U.S. neighborhoods. She found that the number of immigrants in a neighborhood is inconsequential to the amount of unlawful activity. “Increases do not cause violent crime to go up. Decreases do not cause violent crimes to go down,” she said. “It has no effect.” Those findings are consistent with dozens of other studies showing that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans.

Trump officials have dismissed those arguments, advancing something akin to a broken-windows theory that claims permissive border policies encourage immigrants to disregard American laws. Having violated the country’s immigration rules to enter, the theory goes, they’re more inclined to commit more serious offenses once they settle into their new lives. Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, told us there’s no evidence of that. Lehman said criminal-justice scholars debate why the homicide rate has fallen so fast. They point to an array of other factors, including more powerful police surveillance and tracking tools that help cities more effectively deploy officers to areas with higher incidences of violent crime. Others posit more esoteric theories, such as the removal of lead from drinking water and fewer people consuming alcohol. Researchers generally don’t regard immigration enforcement as a significant factor, Lehman said.

When immigration-enforcement officers target serious criminals, however, there are potential benefits to public safety, he said, because a small fraction of offenders commit the majority of offenses. “Some of those offenders are noncitizens who are here illegally. If you remove them from the country, then mechanically you would expect the rate of violence or of serious crime to go down,” he said.

Trump has employed a version of that logic, often claiming that 2 percent of people commit 91 percent of crimes when discussing his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. (The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the National Guard had no significant impact on Washington’s decline in violent crime, but its deployment in high-visibility areas may have deterred people from committing opportunistic property offenses.) A few days after the president declared a “crime emergency” in the capital last year, Stephen Miller told reporters that “the highest degree of national-security and public-safety concern are in sanctuary cities.” Those places, Miller said, release undocumented immigrants who commit crimes back into the community, rather than turn them over to ICE. “And in many cases, those aliens will go on to commit additional serious offenses, including oftentimes—as we’ve seen over and over again—rape and murder.”

FBI and census data from the past year show that neither states with sanctuary cities nor those with high immigrant populations have the highest reported incidence of sexual assault. The five states with the highest reports of rape per capita are Alaska, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana. Each has a relatively low immigrant population, formalized cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, and a Republican in the governor’s office.

[Read: An American city, with troops on its streets]

Recent polling shows that Republicans have lost their long-held advantage over Democrats on the handling of immigration, and other polls show Democrats making up ground on crime. But voters side with Republicans on those key issues more than they do on the economy or health care, and the Trump administration has been eager to highlight them, often at the same time.

Attorney General Todd Blanche held an event at the Department of Justice last Thursday and promised to continue the administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who joined Blanche alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, urged criminal charges against officials running sanctuary cities. (Blanche might have difficulty finding a charge: Sanctuary policies don’t violate criminal statutes.) That afternoon, DOJ announced $25 million in grants for local law-enforcement agencies. But the eligibility requirements come with a catch: Funds are available only to jurisdictions that sign agreements to help ICE make more arrests.