Hate Crimes Continue to Rise, Despite Federal Legislation

By Kainat Rajput 

Five years ago, Congress passed a law meant to make it easier for Americans to report hate crimes. The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, signed by President Biden in May 2021, came in direct response to the surge in anti-Asian violence that swept the country during the pandemic. It expanded reporting access, improved language services, and directed federal grants to community organizations. It felt, at the time, like a real step forward.

It hasn’t been enough.

Anti-Asian hate crimes are still nearly three times higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports data. Of the 5,810 race and ethnicity hate crimes reported last year, 291 targeted Asian Americans, 243 targeted Sikhs, 34 targeted Buddhists, 31 targeted Hindus, 24 targeted Muslims, and 20 targeted Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders — a combined 833 hate crimes against the AA NHPI community. Black Americans remain the most targeted group, with 2,792 reported hate crimes. Anti-semitic hate crimes totaled 1,395.

And every expert who tracks this data says these numbers are almost certainly undercounts.

“Even that severely underreported data shows how big of a problem this remains,” said John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Yang has been working on these issues for 35 years — his organization’s very first report, back when it was founded, focused on under-reported hate crimes against Asian Americans. He noted that anti-Sikh, anti-Hindu, and anti-Buddhist hate crimes are now at the highest levels the FBI has ever recorded.

The federal infrastructure that was built to address this problem is now being dismantled. The Trump administration canceled hate crime prevention grants mid-contract. The Department of Justice filed a criminal complaint against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a 50-year-old civil rights organization. Social media companies are being pressured to pull back on hate content moderation. And the president himself reposted content from a far-right radio host calling immigrants from India and China “gangsters with laptops” and describing those countries as “hellhole countries.” It echoed his earlier use of terms like “China virus,” “Wuhan flu,” and “kung flu” — language that researchers and advocates have directly tied to increased violence against Asian Americans.

“When we have a federal government that is not only failing to prevent hate incidents but actively engaging in conduct and speech that incentivizes it, all Americans suffer,” Yang said.

The Sikh Coalition has been tracking this for a long time. Manirmal Kaur, the organization’s senior federal policy manager, pointed out that anti-Sikh hate in America didn’t start with 9/11. In 1907, violent mobs attacked Sikh immigrant mill workers in Bellingham, Washington, and drove the entire South Asian community out of the area. After 9/11, the Sikh Coalition documented over 300 cases of violence and discrimination against Sikhs in just the first month. The very first deadly hate crime after the attacks was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man shot outside his gas station while planting flowers, by someone who said he was seeking revenge for the terrorist attacks four days earlier.

What’s different now, Kaur said, is how that hate is moving. Stop AAPI Hate data shows anti-South Asian hate surged online following the 2024 presidential election, with May and June of 2025 ranking as the third and fifth highest months for violent threats against South Asians since tracking began. Anti-Sikh language spiked sharply. The Sikh Coalition’s own data, from schools and community intake lines, shows the same pattern.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council documented an 11-fold increase in attacks against American Muslims and mosques in March of this year compared to every previous month they’ve tracked — a surge that coincided with escalating U.S. military involvement in Iran and inflammatory rhetoric from elected officials. Sameer Hossain, MPAC’s managing director, recalled the 2001 Dallas shooting in which a gunman walked into a gas station and asked the cashier where he was from, then opened fire. The victims were a Bangladeshi Muslim, an Indian Hindu, and a Pakistani Muslim — all South Asian, none of them connected to the attacks the shooter claimed to be avenging. The shooter’s confusion about who he was targeting didn’t matter. What mattered was that he saw a category of people he’d been told were the enemy.

“Ignorance is what led to those hate crimes,” the survivor later said, after campaigning for clemency for the man who shot him in the face. That was 2001. In October 2023, a landlord in suburban Chicago forced his way into a Palestinian-American family’s home and attacked them, yelling about the October 7th attacks. He killed a six-year-old boy named Wadea Al-Fayoume, whose last words to his mother were, “Mom, I’m fine.”

Stop AAPI Hate released new survey data on the day of the briefing. Their findings: half of all AAPI adults surveyed — across East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander groups — reported experiencing a hate act in 2025. That’s not a crime, necessarily. It’s harassment, discrimination, intimidation. The kind of thing that never appears in FBI statistics because it was never reported to police, and even if it had been, might not have been recorded as a hate incident.

Only 22 percent of those who experienced a hate act reported it to any formal authority. People gave different reasons — they didn’t think anything would happen, they didn’t know how to report, they were afraid of immigration enforcement. Stephanie Chan, director of data and research at Stop AAPI Hate, said the language of the incidents tracked through their reporting center has shifted noticeably since 2020. Attackers used to blame Asian people for COVID. Now they say things like, “Trump should deport you.”

There are structural reasons hate crimes go unprosecuted even when they are reported. Prosecutors have to prove specific bias motivation beyond a reasonable doubt — a high bar that often isn’t met. Officers responding to incidents may not recognize signs of bias in communities they don’t know. A Sikh person having their turban ripped off might not trigger a hate crime investigation if the officer doesn’t know that a turban is an article of faith. Language barriers between victims and officers compound the problem. Prosecutors may not fully understand their state’s hate crime statutes. One survey respondent told Stop AAPI Hate that after someone yelled racial slurs at her and continued harassing her for days, she filed a police report and was told that “go back to your country” didn’t count as racism.

Seventy-three percent of AAPI adults who experienced hate reported feeling stressed. Participation in community organizing and civic engagement has dropped from 74 percent in 2023 to 56 percent in 2025. People are pulling back.

“This is the time when we need that the most,” Chan said.

Yang argued that state and local governments need to step in where the federal government has stepped back — funding reporting hotlines, distributing congressionally appropriated community grants that the current administration hasn’t released, passing legislation like the Improving Reporting to Prevent Hate Act. He’s seen these cycles before: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the post-9/11 targeting of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities. He’s not naive about how bad things can get.

He’s also not giving up.

“Our communities have responded to these playbooks before,” he said. “We just need to rise up and do that again.”