The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) put out its annual hate crime report for 2025 on August 14. It showed hate crime incidents falling overall across the United States, even as bias crimes against Sikhs and Hindus climbed compared to the previous year.
Figures from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting programme put the 2025 total at 10,606 hate crime incidents, roughly 7 per cent lower than the 11,404 logged the year before.
A study by the civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), done jointly with the Sikh Coalition, went through the FBI numbers and found the opposite trend within three religious groups. Anti-Sikh incidents went from 142 in 2024 to 177 in 2025, a jump of 24.6 per cent. Anti-Hindu incidents climbed from 25 to 28, up 12 per cent. Anti-Buddhist incidents moved from 26 to 28, a rise of 7.7 per cent.
The two groups linked the rise to “anti-immigrant rhetoric and attempts being made to portray Sikh and Punjabi truck drivers as public safety threats.”
A different FBI count, this one of single-bias religious hate-crime offences rather than incidents, points to the same pattern through its own set of numbers. Agencies logged 2,703 such offences in 2025, of which Sikhs accounted for about 189 (7 per cent) and Hindus for about 32 (1.2 per cent). A year earlier, out of 3,096 offences, roughly 152 were anti-Sikh (4.9 per cent) and 25 were anti-Hindu (0.8 per cent). Measured this way, anti-Sikh offences climbed 24.34 per cent and anti-Hindu offences 28 per cent.
On race, ethnicity and ancestry, the FBI counted 7,200 single-bias offences for 2025, with anti-Asian bias behind 5.8 per cent of them. Indian Americans do not get their own line in this racial or ethnic breakdown, however. Depending on how a particular police department filed a case, an Indian-origin victim’s complaint might instead show up under one of the religious bias categories rather than here.
The total number of hate crime victims across the country also fell, from 14,243 in 2024 to 13,438 in 2025, FBI figures show.
AAJC’s study flagged that these numbers still leave out much of what happens on the ground, since a large share of bias-driven harassment and violence goes unrecorded. “Hate crime data has long suffered from significant underreporting by both victims and law enforcement agencies. The risk of statistical underreporting is heightened by the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies that increasingly rely on and reinforce anti-Asian, anti-South Asian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Sikh narratives,” the study said.
Sim J. Singh Attariwala, Director of the Anti-Hate Program at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the danger extends beyond crimes simply going unaddressed. “The real risk is not simply that hate goes unaddressed, but that it becomes invisible. When the federal government dismantles hate-crime prevention initiatives, cuts grants, weakens civil rights enforcement, and erodes trust among immigrant communities, the impact is felt far beyond Washington, D.C.,” he said.
