Trump’s crime crackdown claims historic results

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Trump’s crime crackdown claims historic results

By Wendi Strauch Mahoney
Oct. 18, 2025

Operation Summer Heat was the FBI’s three-month, nationwide surge to “crush violent crime,” according to FBI director Kash Patel, who spoke about it in the Oval Office alongside President Trump on Wednesday. The bureau coordinated the operation across all 55 field offices, focusing on the “worst of the worst” offenders — gang members, armed robbers, narcotics-traffickers, and violent fugitives — while also running child-exploitation rescues and weapons and drug seizures. The operation began June 24, 2025 and ran through September 20.

Restoring law and order and removing violent offenders from communities has been a central priority for the Trump administration. According to Patel, the FBI and its law enforcement partners made a record number of arrests in three months — more than 8,700. They also seized 930 pounds of fentanyl, 98,250 pounds of cocaine, and 2,281 firearms. In the same period, authorities secured at least 2,100 indictments, and 1,053 child victims were identified and located nationwide.

A review of the publicly available data on Operation Summer Heat confirmed results from 16 field offices to date. Additional field offices may be lagging in submitting data, and other figures may appear through Department of Justice links or local agency releases. Below are a snapshot table and chart that compile all statistics released so far:

PICS

The Phoenix field office edges out Boston in total arrests, 411 to 404, followed by Baltimore in third place at 224. Phoenix also tops the list for child victims identified and recovered (103) and drug seizures (63), while Baltimore trails by just one seizure at 62.

Patel said the FBI and its partners have located around 5,400 children nationwide, a “30 percent increase over the previous administration,” and “arrests for violent crimes against children alone are up 10 percent.” Patel also said gang arrests are up 110 percent in the last seven months, and transnational organized crime arrests are up more than 12 percent in the same time period. President Trump’s homeland security adviser Stephen Miller has been a key architect of immigration policy, including a new task force with a focus on drug cartels and transnational crime.

Patel stated that his proudest achievement has been to stem the deadly flow of fentanyl into the U.S. “The FBI,” said Patel, “has seized 1,900 kg of fentanyl — enough doses to kill 127 million Americans.” He complimented the president for “empowering the Department of Justice to go after the worst of the worst.” Patel also shared that the FBI is working on “capturing the FBI 10 Most Wanted Fugitives,” many of whom have been “on the run for years.” Patel added, “In seven months, we captured not one, not two, not three, but four of the FBI’s top 10 fugitives. The Biden administration captured four in four years.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Summer Heat “set the stage” for this week’s crime-busting successes in Memphis. “Last night alone in Memphis, there were 70 arrests, 12 guns seized, and agents arrested a 70-year-old man who raped a child under the age of three. That one case makes everything we are doing worthwhile,” Bondi added.

Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche shared what he described as two notable, real-world accomplishments behind the Summer Heat statistics. One of the stories he shared involved “a hotel in the middle of a town in Alaska that was being run as a drug den.” Blanche continued,

There were over 1,000 calls to 911 for over four years during the last administration. There were multiple violent crimes, drug dealers, overdoses and murders at this one hotel — ruining a community. Summer Heat went in there. They not only arrested all the participants that were controlling the hotel, but they seized the hotel. And so that’s one example of what Summer Heat means to everyday Americans that just want to live in peace.

An Aug. 25, 2025 report in the Anchorage Daily News corroborates Blanche’s account, noting that the probe into the notorious Spenard property — the Chelsea Inn — spanned “nearly five years.” Michelle Theriault Boots from the Anchorage Daily News wrote,

Hotel manager Chantel Lynn Fields, 36, and owner Kyoung Soo Seo, 62, are both charged with conspiracy to maintain a drug-involved premises at the Chelsea Inn. ... The Chelsea Inn has been the site of several fatal incidents in recent years, including the killing of an employee in 2020, a shooting in 2023 and a stabbing of a tenant in June.

During the years from 2020 to 2025, Anchorage police were called some 1,214 times to 3836 Spenard Road, including 22 times for assaults, 85 times for warrants and 134 times for disturbances, according to data provided by the department.

The other success, said Blanche, involved a “large narcotics-trafficking group that was selling fentanyl in the state of Washington. They were shipping fentanyl, using commercial aircraft, putting fentanyl pills and powder in suitcases, flying them from the Southwest border, mostly Arizona, all the way to Washington. It had been going on a very long time. And the entire organization was arrested.”

Patel calls Summer Heat the most “successful operation in U.S. history” — a claim that lacks a strict apples-to-apples yardstick. Even so, by sheer scale and speed, it appears to be among the largest short-window crime-surge operations on record. The closest analogue is Operation Legend, a DOJ-led surge launched in 2020 during the first Trump administration by Attorney General Bill Barr, named for four-year-old LeGend Taliferro.

Barr launched Operation Legend to combat violent crime, and it ran from July 8, 2020 through late 2020. The surge brought roughly 6,000 arrests, including around 467 homicide suspects and the seizure of more than 2,600 firearms nationwide. Agents also recovered approximately 70 pounds of heroin, 35 pounds of fentanyl, 660 pounds of meth, 300 pounds of cocaine, and over $11M in illicit proceeds. No centralized, national child victim tally was reported for the 2020 operation.


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From American Thinker
Link: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...c_results.html






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