Daniel Wolfram
Internal data exposes the bogus stats behind Patel’s violent crime “surge.”
FBI Director Kash Patel recently celebrated what he called a 90 percent surge in violent crime arrests, pointing to 54,000 suspects taken into custody during his tenure.
Yet those claims fall apart when you take a longer look at the data.
According to an MS NOW review of Justice Department records, thousands of those arrests were made by local street and state police who merely had a federal agent standing nearby.
Cooking the books
The FBI has even acknowledged that many of those arrests were never federal matters.
In reality, public records shared by Justice Connection reveal that the FBI referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution than it did during the same stretch under the Biden administration. Violent crime prosecutions across the entire Department of Justice fell by that exact same margin.
Former bureau veterans warn that these inflated metrics hide serious problems inside the bureau. Christopher O’Leary, a former senior official for the FBI, told MS NOW that Patel is “actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative.”
Nearly 3,800 fewer defendants faced federal violent crime charges across all agencies. That is a steep drop from what Patel has otherwise touted.
Changing the mission
Instead, the FBI’s focus has swung toward immigration enforcement.
Patel has pushed agents into border cases, pulling them away from national security investigations. Between February 2025 and July 2026, immigration offenses made up nearly 60 percent of all federal criminal filings, up from roughly 36 percent during the Biden years.
In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI defended its numbers, saying it has always included “violent crime arrests where the FBI has equity in the case and investigation.” But retired agent Daniel Brunner rejected that defense flatly. “It’s never been done,” Brunner said, explaining that field offices routinely pushed back against taking credit for local arrests.
Why is Patel doing this?
One reason so many officers have been reassigned to work border cases and have been told to make more arrests is the Trump administration’s heavy focus on border security and illegal immigrants.
The other reason why Patel is so intent on inflating the arrest numbers is that he knows he has an audience of one: his president.
The Atlantic has reported that Patel is one of the staunchest MAGA loyalists within the Trump administration. According to the report, Patel has been told by White House officials that “the president wants indictments. He wants people in handcuffs.”
And Trump is getting them, even though the numbers are misleading. But Kash Patel does not care and he is hoping and counting on the fact that Trump does not either.
