Kash Patel walked into an FBI that critics say spent the Biden years chasing parents and churchgoers instead of killers.
His enemies in the press swear his crime numbers are nothing but smoke and mirrors.
And Patel just put out a scorecard that Joe Biden’s team would rather nobody read.
The FBI Lined Up 21 Months of Handcuffs Against Biden’s Last 21
The FBI released a fresh batch of figures covering the first 21 months of President Trump’s second term, and the bureau set them right beside the final 21 months of the Biden administration.
The comparison isn’t close. According to the bureau, agents arrested more than 47,000 violent criminals and gang members in that stretch, a 67 percent jump over Biden’s closing months.
Arrests of child sex predators and human traffickers climbed 13 percent to just over 6,000, the FBI said.
FBI Director Kash Patel kept the list going from there. He pointed to a 30 percent drop in the national murder rate, a 114 percent increase in arrests of violent crime suspects, and more than 4,600 kilograms of fentanyl seized. The bureau says that much poison could kill more than 350 million Americans, which is more people than the country actually has.
Agents also ran down 10 fugitives from the Ten Most Wanted list, two and a half times the number caught over the previous four years. A brand-new “Most Wanted Fraudsters” list produced six captures in its first four months.
“Over the last 21 months under the Trump administration’s leadership and working alongside our Department of Justice and law enforcement partners, this FBI has delivered the largest reduction in violent crime in United States history,” Patel said.
He handed the credit straight up the chain. “This is what happens with a President who backs the blue, an Attorney General who relentlessly prosecutes criminals, and good cops all over the country getting the job done,” Patel said.
Merrick Garland’s FBI Had Other Targets in Mind
A number only means something next to the one it replaced. And the bureau Patel inherited had a very different list of priorities.
Patel has said that under the prior administration, violent crime barely cracked the bureau’s top 10 priorities. At a White House press conference in October 2025, he rattled off the Biden-era yearly totals for violent felon arrests, roughly 16,000, 17,000, 15,000, and 15,000. Flat as a two-lane road through the Texas Panhandle.
So what kept all those agents busy?
In October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memo directing the FBI to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” Garland issued it five days after the National School Boards Association asked the Biden White House for federal muscle against angry parents.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) later said whistleblowers told his committee that the FBI opened investigations into 25 of those parents and attached threat tags to their names. These were moms and dads who showed up at a microphone to complain about what their kids learned in government schools.
Then came Richmond. In January 2023, the FBI’s Richmond Field Office published an internal memo warning about violent extremists and what it called “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.” Analysts leaned on the Southern Poverty Law Center for a list of supposed hate groups, and later documents showed the office used at least one undercover agent to gather information about traditionalist Catholics.
Garland called suggestions of anti-Catholic bias “outrageous” and “absurd” when lawmakers pressed him in September 2023.
But the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group reached its own verdict in August 2026, branding the memo “a grave failure” of the Richmond office. The FBI later fired five Richmond employees over it.
That was the bureau Patel took over. Undercover work aimed at Latin Mass parishes. Threat tags on parents. Violent felons running loose in numbers that barely moved year to year.
The Cable Crowd Wants to Audit the Handcuffs
Not everybody in the press corps is popping champagne.
MS NOW claimed earlier this year that Patel’s totals include arrests made by state and local police and other federal agencies whenever the FBI had a hand in the case, and it reported a drop in federal violent crime charges during the opening stretch of Trump’s second term. The FBI fired back that it has always counted “violent crime arrests where the FBI has equity in the case and investigation.” Several former bureau officials told MS NOW they disagree.
But think about how a gang roundup actually works. City detectives, county deputies, and federal agents kick in the same doors on the same morning, and joint task forces have operated that way for decades. Any retired sheriff’s deputy from Alabama could explain it over a cup of diner coffee in about two minutes.
The critics’ complaint boils down to who gets the credit. Nobody in that camp has argued the arrests didn’t happen.
Critics also insist violent crime was already sliding once the pandemic-era spike burned out. Funny how Biden’s team never turned down credit for that slide while it was running the show.
MS NOW also accused the bureau of adding some fugitives to the Ten Most Wanted list shortly before agents caught them. In the case critics cite most often, agents grabbed a man wanted in a double murder in Culiacan, Mexico, roughly an hour after his name went up. A man prosecutors want for two killings ended up in handcuffs, and a cable network wants to argue about the order of the paperwork.
This is the same network that told viewers in October that Patel had landed in Russia while he stood at a law enforcement event at Liberty University in Virginia. Its corrections desk has been busy.
What a Bureau Chooses to Chase
Agents only have so many hours in a week. Every hour spent building a file on a mother at a school board meeting is an hour nobody spent tracking a fentanyl dealer or a gang shooter.
And that is the real story buried under the percentages. The Biden Justice Department made choices. Garland’s team pointed the bureau at parents, at traditional Catholics, and through the Arctic Frost probe, at the phone records of Republican senators. Violent crime arrests sat on a plateau the whole time.
Patel made a different choice. He moved the bureau toward the street, and the arrest totals took off.
Maybe some of the shine wears off once outside analysts finish picking apart every category. Statistics always invite a fight. But the overall direction isn’t hard to read, even for folks who never cared much for spreadsheets.
Democrats on Capitol Hill already talk about hauling Trump officials in for hearings after the midterms. If they ever get the chance to steer the bureau again, voters will have a clear record of what the FBI looked like under each set of priorities.
The FBI launched its Ten Most Wanted list on March 14, 1950, to put the country’s most dangerous fugitives in front of the public. Seventy-six years later, catching them too quickly became a scandal.
Sources: Fox News, “FBI reports 67% jump in violent crime arrests under Trump compared to Biden’s final months” (Louis Casiano); Fox News opinion, Kash Patel op-ed on the FBI’s first year; Fox News and Breitbart coverage of the October 2025 Trump-Patel press conference; Christian Post on the Garland school board memo and Richmond memo; House Judiciary Committee, Chairman Jim Jordan opening statement on FBI oversight; Catholic News Agency; US Department of Justice, Weaponization Working Group report on the Richmond Catholic memo; Franklin News-Post; Raw Story and Attack of the Fanboy summaries of MS NOW’s FBI arrest data report; The Daily Beast; Newsweek; Mediaite.