Mexico’s president pushed back Tuesday after a top Trump adviser claimed Mexico City is “run by cartels.” At her morning press conference, Claudia Sheinbaum told security and foreign affairs officials to send crime statistics directly to Stephen Miller. She framed his remark as misinformation that ignores the capital’s multi-year trend of lower homicides and other high-impact crimes. Independent reporting and official records indicate a significant decline compared to 2019, although the exact percentage varies depending on the baseline and period used. Here is what she said—and what the data shows.
Sheinbaum rebuts cartels run Mexico City claim
President Claudia Sheinbaum used her morning briefing to address Stephen Miller’s televised claim that cartels “govern” the capital. She instructed the Security Ministry and the Foreign Ministry to send Miller recent crime figures and argued that his comment misrepresented the city’s security trajectory. “There is good work to address insecurity,” she said, while acknowledging remaining problems.
The remark Miller made came during a Fox News appearance in which he lumped Mexico City into a broader U.S. partisan attack line. The outlet reported Sheinbaum’s response and her reference to the multi-year decline in homicides.
What the latest public numbers say
City authorities have published month-by-month reports since 2019. In early August, Mexico City’s government and prosecutors said intentional homicides from January to July fell to roughly half of the 2019 level for the same period. Media outlets that attended the briefing reported a 51% drop compared to 2019 and a further decrease compared to 2024. Those statements track with official summaries.
That does not mean crime has vanished, and percentages vary depending on the timeframe. Sheinbaum has previously cited a decline of ~60% using longer baselines. Fact-checking and city data indicate a downward trend, but the exact figure depends on the months and categories being compared. The core point remains: homicide in the capital is well below its 2019 level.
Perception and policing capacity
Perception of safety matters for daily life. INEGI’s national victimization and perception survey shows that Mexico City’s fear of crime has decreased in recent years and now sits near or below national averages, although concern remains high. Perception never moves in lockstep with incident counts, but it offers context for residents’ lived experience.
In terms of capacity, the city has expanded patrol coverage and equipment this year, including thousands of new units for “quadrants,” which structure neighborhood policing. The current strategy couples more visible patrols with investigative coordination between the police and prosecutors.
The national backdrop—and the caveats
Nationally, Mexico’s daily homicide average has trended lower compared with 2018, according to the federal security secretariat’s compilations and the presidency’s periodic updates. These are national figures, not city-specific, but they help explain the federal framing Sheinbaum often uses. As always, all crime data carry lags, reclassifications, and methodology limits. That is why independent press coverage and official bulletins should be read in conjunction with each other.
Why this dispute resonates beyond politics
Miller’s line plays into a U.S. narrative that treats Mexico’s capital as uniformly captured by organized crime. The available city data, combined with the lived experiences of residents and visitors, paint a more complex picture—one that encompasses both improvement and persistent hotspots. That nuance matters for policy, investment, tourism, and binational cooperation.
Sheinbaum’s push to “send the data” is as much about information integrity as it is about security. If her administration wants to win this argument, it will need to continue releasing detailed, verifiable numbers and invite outside scrutiny. The records to date indicate meaningful progress compared to 2019, even as the work remains unfinished.
