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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of Homeland Security and deepen the influence of the White House.<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors\u2019 control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.<\/p>\n
Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump\u2019s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project\u2019s implementation.<\/p>\n
Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo the administration\u2019s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,\u201d said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. \u201cBut you won\u2019t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,\u201d he added of the task force plan. \u201cThe White House will be able to decide.\u201d<\/p>\n
The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.<\/p>\n
The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government\u2019s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, \u201cProtecting the American People Against Invasion,\u201d which focused on immigration.<\/p>\n
The new task forces will seek \u201cto end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,\u201d the order states. They will also aim to \u201cend the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.<\/p>\n
A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller\u2019s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. \u201cWhile the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,\u201d she said, \u201cthe Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president\u2019s Homeland Security Council.<\/p>\n
The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a \u201ccoordinated, whole-of-government approach\u201d to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n
Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces \u2014 which the Trump administration is shutting down.<\/p>\n
Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced \u201coh-suh-def\u201d), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.<\/p>\n
The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.<\/p>\n
While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.<\/p>\n
As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n
But just weeks after Blanche\u2019s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF\u2019s \u201cmission and resources\u201d but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese were not broken programs,\u201d said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration\u2019s plans on condition of anonymity. \u201cIf you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials also cited other concerns about the administration\u2019s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.<\/p>\n
Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF\u2019s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,\u201d a Justice Department official said. \u201cIf you want to improve something, great, but they don\u2019t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a \u201csupremacy clause,\u201d that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.<\/p>\n
An excerpt from a planning document drafted for the president\u2019s Homeland Security Council describes how the new Homeland Security Task Forces would take charge of major organized crime investigations.<\/span><\/p>\n The clause will require \u201cthat any new or existing investigative and\/or intelligence initiatives\u201d targeting transnational criminal organizations \u201cmust be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,\u201d according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.<\/p>\n \u201cFurther,\u201d it adds, \u201cthe supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.\u201d<\/p>\n Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.<\/p>\n In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.<\/p>\n One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration\u2019s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency\u2019s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaqu\u00edn Guzm\u00e1n Loera, known as \u201cEl Chapo.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos\u2019 leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram\u2019s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaqu\u00edn Guzm\u00e1n L\u00f3pez, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzm\u00e1n L\u00f3pez initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)<\/p>\n As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzm\u00e1n Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys\u2019 offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.<\/p>\n Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.<\/p>\n Regional and national task forces will be overseen by \u201cexecutive committees\u201d that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,\u201d a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. \u201cAny suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.\u201d<\/p>\n During Trump\u2019s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration\u2019s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.<\/p>\n The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 \u201ccriminal illegal aliens\u201d in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.<\/p>\n Agents of Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, part of the new Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants in connection with a cockfighting ring in northern Alabama in mid-June.<\/span><\/p>\n On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were \u201ctied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.\u201d Once again, however, no details were provided.<\/p>\n It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.<\/p>\n In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the Department\u2019s website notes, OCDETF \u2018is the centerpiece of the Attorney General\u2019s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,\u2019\u201d the senators wrote.<\/p>\n In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF\u2019s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.<\/p>\n \n Seven Things to Know About ProPublica\u2019s Investigation of the FDA\u2019s Secret Gamble on Generic Drugs<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n \u201cA lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,\u201d said one former senior official. \u201cBut without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.\u201d<\/p>\n Veteran officials at the DEA \u2014 who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces\u2014 are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.<\/p>\n \u201cDEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,\u201d one former senior official said. \u201cIt is mind-boggling. They\u2019re just getting orders saying, \u2018This is what Stephen Miller wants and you\u2019ve got to give it to us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published. The Trump administration has launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2173,2167,2171,2169,671,2170,2172,1436,247,81,2168],"class_list":{"0":"post-9680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-crime","9":"tag-dhs","10":"tag-fight","11":"tag-greater","12":"tag-house","13":"tag-influence","14":"tag-organized","15":"tag-plan","16":"tag-propublica","17":"tag-trump","18":"tag-white"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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