Latinos account for nearly one in seven hate-crime victims in the United States, according to a new analysis of FBI hate-crime data, underscoring how anti-Hispanic bias remains a national threat even as the country's Latino population continues to grow.
The analysis, based on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting hate-crime statistics and U.S. Census Bureau population data from 2021 through 2025, found wide disparities in where anti-Hispanic incidents are reported most often. Some states with large Latino populations recorded relatively low rates, while smaller states with fewer Hispanic residents showed sharply higher rates per capita.
The findings come as hate crimes remain near historic highs nationwide. The FBI's latest official annual report, released in 2025 for calendar year 2024, recorded 11,679 hate-crime incidents involving 14,243 victims across the country. The Justice Department said 11,323 single-bias incidents involved 13,768 victims, while 356 multiple-bias incidents involved 475 victims.
Anti-Hispanic or Latino hate crimes remain one of the most common race, ethnicity or ancestry-based categories in federal data. In 2024, the FBI recorded 797 anti-Hispanic or Latino incidents, involving 1,091 victims, according to federal hate-crime data compiled through the FBI's Crime Data Explorer.
Preliminary 2025 figures suggest the trend may have worsened. A California Association of Human Relations Organizations report using FBI data found anti-Latino hate-crime incidents rose 18% nationwide from 858 in 2024 to 1,014 in 2025, according to the Los Angeles Times. The same report found California's anti-Latino incidents increased from 209 to 240 during that period.
That increase matters because the FBI's own data show overall hate-crime reporting remains elevated even when year-to-year totals fluctuate. The FBI said more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies participated in hate-crime reporting for 2024, covering 95.1% of the U.S. population.
The state-by-state picture is uneven. According to the new analysis, Oregon had the highest anti-Hispanic hate-crime rate in the country, at 6.47 incidents per 100,000 Latino residents from 2021 to 2025. That rate was roughly 25 times higher than Florida's 0.26 per 100,000 Latino residents, the lowest rate among all 50 states.
Florida ranked as the lowest-rate state despite having one of the largest Hispanic populations in the country. The analysis found Florida averaged 15.8 anti-Hispanic hate-crime incidents annually while accounting for only 1.85% of all anti-Hispanic hate crimes recorded nationally. Texas, home to nearly 12 million Latinos, ranked fifth lowest, with 56.6 average annual incidents and a rate of 0.47 per 100,000 Latino residents.
The lowest-rate states in the analysis were Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Texas, New York, Arkansas, New Mexico, Delaware and Connecticut. The finding suggests that raw incident totals alone can be misleading because states with larger Latino populations may record more cases overall while still having lower per-capita rates.
Civil-rights groups have long warned that FBI hate-crime statistics likely undercount the true scale of the problem. Participation by local law enforcement agencies has improved since the FBI moved fully to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, but reporting remains uneven. Some victims never report attacks, while some local agencies report zero hate crimes in a given year despite serving large populations.
The FBI defines hate crimes as criminal offenses motivated, in whole or in part, by bias against race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender or gender identity. Anti-Hispanic or Latino bias falls under the race, ethnicity and ancestry category.
The persistence of anti-Latino hate crimes has drawn renewed attention in recent years amid heated national debates over immigration, border enforcement and deportations. Advocates say political rhetoric can heighten fear in communities that are already less likely to report crimes because of language barriers, immigration concerns or mistrust of law enforcement.
The 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, remains one of the deadliest examples of anti-Hispanic violence in modern U.S. history. Federal prosecutors said the gunman targeted Hispanics and drove to the border city because of racist beliefs. The attack killed 23 people and wounded many others.
More recent cases have also raised alarms. In 2024, authorities in Crete, Nebraska, investigated a shooting that wounded seven Guatemalan immigrants, including children, as a possible racially motivated attack. Police said the suspect had previously told the victims to "go back" to their country and "speak English."
For Latino communities, the numbers tell only part of the story. The new analysis shows that anti-Hispanic hate crimes are not limited to border states or traditional immigrant gateways. They appear across the national map, with the highest risk often found in places where Latinos make up a smaller share of the population.
That makes the national takeaway harder to ignore: anti-Hispanic hate is not a regional issue. It is an American one.
