FBI Director Kash Patel claims 54,000 violent crime arrests under his watch. Then data reveals he is taking credit for local police work

FBI Director Kash Patel has publicly said the bureau has arrested 54,000 violent criminals since he took charge. He has called the total a 90 percent rise compared with the same stretch under the Biden administration. An MS NOW review of Justice Department data, however, shows the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution in the second Trump administration than in the matching Biden period.

The same data shows the Justice Department charged people with violent crimes in 15 percent fewer cases during the first 16 months of the current administration. Nearly 3,800 fewer people faced federal violent-crime charges in that window than in the comparable Biden period. Those figures cover referrals from every federal agency, not only the FBI.

Patel’s 54,000 figure counts arrests made by state and local police and by other federal agencies when an FBI employee was present. The FBI has acknowledged that many of those arrests are not its own cases. Former bureau officials say the FBI previously kept separate tallies of assistance to local police and did not treat those arrests as FBI accomplishments.

Federal data and former officials describe a different count of arrests and cases

Public Justice Department numbers show immigration offenses accounted for 59.3 percent of all federal criminal cases filed from February 2025 through July 2026. The share stood at 41.1 percent in a similar stretch of the first Trump administration and 35.5 percent under Biden. 

Patel has directed FBI agents to help with immigration enforcement, a role that has not been a traditional focus for the bureau.

Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official, said, “Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative.” He added that the bureau is “poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments” and that the resulting numbers create “an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground.”

Former FBI agent Daniel Brunner said counting state and local arrests as FBI achievements “has never been done.” He explained that when agents tried the practice in the past, “it was always pushed back on at the local division. Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”

The FBI stated to MS NOW that it has always included “violent crime arrests where the FBI has equity in the case and investigation.” Multiple former officials called that description inaccurate. Patel has also been accused of loosening the bureau’s recruitment policy. 

Federal data also show the FBI has lost more than 1,600 criminal investigators and 335 analysts since January 2025, and most of those positions have not been filled. The bureau’s budget has not kept pace with inflation.

Across the country, law enforcement recorded 11.3 million arrests from January 2025 onward, according to the same FBI data set Patel has cited.

Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who tracks crime statistics, said of the 54,000 total, “You’re talking about a drop in the bucket.” He noted that federal task forces can help local efforts but are rarely large enough to change national trends by themselves.

John Roman, a crime-trends expert at the University of Chicago, said the new counting approach appears to reflect the heavier focus on immigration operations and asked whether it is the best use of limited FBI resources.

In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI did not dispute the lower referral numbers. It pointed instead to falling violent-crime rates and said, “This FBI and our law enforcement partners delivered the largest year of violent crime reduction in American history, achieved the most significant drop in the national murder rate ever recorded since 1936.” The decline has been a nationwide pattern for several years after a short spike during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Michael Feinberg, a former FBI agent, said, “He’s taking credit for other agencies’ efforts.” He noted that the great majority of violent crime cases are handled under state law by state and local officers. 

The FBI has also made other public statements about crime figures that do not match its own releases, including a math error that treated a 97 percent increase as a 197 percent increase and differing descriptions of specific operations compared with Justice Department announcements.