Trump lamented crimes committed by migrants living in the United States illegally during an exchange that followed a question about immigration.

“All over the world, crime is down, all over the world, except here. Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made,” Trump said. “Crime in this country is through the roof, and we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime, and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”

Muir, who is an ABC News anchor, interjected and pointed to a report from the FBI this year that said violent crime nationwide was down 15% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to one year ago.

“President Trump, as you know, the FBI says, overall, violent crime is actually coming down in this country,” Muir said.

Trump shot back that the FBI’s statistics were missing cities with the “worst crime.”

“Excuse me, the FBI — they were defrauding statements,” Trump said. “They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.”

Trump’s remark was partially true. The FBI changed the way it gathered national crime data in 2021, temporarily upending its Uniform Crime Report program, through which it releases quarterly statistics about crime in the U.S.

This initially resulted in some major U.S. police departments, including in New York City and Los Angeles, failing to comply with the FBI’s changed method. This meant that urban areas, where crime is more prevalent, were left out of the statistics.

The FBI’s first quarter data this year is still in a preliminary state, and while many major cities are now included in that data, some still are not. Los Angeles, which saw an increase in violent crime in the first quarter of 2024, is among those jurisdictions still missing from it.

A notice on the FBI’s reporting dashboard reads that this year’s first quarter data is “based on data received from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the country,” meaning more than a quarter of law enforcement agencies are missing from the data.

Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said national and even state-level crime statistics cannot provide a full picture because “crime is such a hyper-localized phenomenon.”

Debates about crime statistics, he said, can also become “wonky” because of all of the variables involved in data collection.

“[The FBI] made it much more difficult and time intensive for local police departments to report their statistics to the FBI,” Smith told the Washington Examiner.

He added that “many jurisdictions, including some of the biggest jurisdictions, either did not report or are severely delayed in reporting.”

Smith also noted that even if violent crime ticked down this year, “it’s still going to be significantly higher than it was four to five years ago.”