Latest news with #HomelandSecurity
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
A New Trump Plan Gives DHS and the White House Greater Influence in the Fight Against Organized Crime
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. 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. The administration's plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors' 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. 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's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project's implementation. 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. 'To the administration's credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,' 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. 'But you won't have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,' he added of the task force plan. 'The White House will be able to decide.' 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. 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's lead agency for narcotics enforcement. Trump's directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, 'Protecting the American People Against Invasion,' which focused on immigration. The new task forces will seek 'to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,' the order states. They will also aim to 'end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.' 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. A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller's role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. 'While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,' she said, 'the 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.' 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's Homeland Security Council. The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a 'coordinated, whole-of-government approach' to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies. 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 — which the Trump administration is shutting down. Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced 'oh-suh-def'), 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. 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. 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. 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. But just weeks after Blanche's 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's 'mission and resources' but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees. 'These were not broken programs,' said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration's plans on condition of anonymity. 'If 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.' Officials also cited other concerns about the administration's 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. Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF's 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. 'They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,' a Justice Department official said. 'If you want to improve something, great, but they don't even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.' The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a 'supremacy clause,' that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap. The clause will require 'that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives' targeting transnational criminal organizations 'must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,' according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica. 'Further,' it adds, 'the 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.' 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. 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. One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration's DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency's cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as 'El Chapo.' Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos' leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram's 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, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.) 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, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys' 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. 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. Regional and national task forces will be overseen by 'executive committees' that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said. 'The 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,' a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. 'Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.' During Trump's first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration's 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. 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 'criminal illegal aliens' in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations. 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 'tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.' Once again, however, no details were provided. 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. In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News. 'As the Department's website notes, OCDETF 'is the centerpiece of the Attorney General's strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,'' the senators wrote. In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF's 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. 'A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,' said one former senior official. 'But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.' Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— 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. 'DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,' one former senior official said. 'It is mind-boggling. They're just getting orders saying, 'This is what Stephen Miller wants and you've got to give it to us.''
Washington Post
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
The Afghans at risk of deportation
Afghan refugees evacuated from Kabul board a bus after arriving at the Al Udeid military base in Qatar on Aug. 31, 2021. (Lorenzo Tugnoli/For The Washington Post) This month Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the administration's termination of temporary protected status, or TPS, for Afghans, exposing thousands, potentially, to deportation as soon as next week, when the policy is to take effect. Today on 'Post Reports,' national security reporter Abigail Hauslohner explains. Today's show was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy and mixed by Sean Carter. It was edited by Maggie Penman. Thank you to Andy deGrandpre, Hasiba Atakpal, Spojmie Nasiri, Shala Gafary, Negina Khalili, Helal Massomi. Subscribe to The Washington Post here.
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
Andrea Velez: U.S. woman detained by ICE after being ambushed by unmarked cars in Los Angeles
The Brief Andrea Velez, a United States citizen, was ambushed by a group of people from an unmarked vehicle, her attorneys say. Velez was detained by ICE and was charged with "obstructing an ICE officer." FOX 11 tried to contact Homeland Security, but the department could not be reached for comment before 9 p.m., June 26. LOS ANGELES - A woman who was walking to work in downtown Los Angeles got ambushed by a group of people from an unmarked car, according to her attorney. What we know Attorneys Gregory Russell and Luis Carrillo spoke on 32-year-old Andrea Velez's behalf in recalling the traumatic event. Velez ended up getting detained in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 24. Carrillo accused the Los Angeles Police Department of not saving Velez when the American citizen got ambushed by the alleged agents. "[Velez] ran to the LAPD," Carrillo recalled. "The officers… didn't give her any protection. They let the ICE people take her away." The LAPD has since said the department doesn't get involved with immigration operations, and their job focuses more on providing crowd control. Velez has since been released on bond, but was charged with "obstructing an ICE officer." The Source This report used information provided by attorneys representing Velez. FOX 11 tried to contact Homeland Security, but could not be reached for comment before 9 p.m. on June 26.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
Multi-agency drug investigation leads to Houma area arrest
HOUMA, La. (WGNO) — Narcotic agents with the Houma Police Department have made an arrest in alleged illegal drug activity in the Mechanicville area on Thursday, June 26. In partnership with Homeland Security Investigations and the Louisiana State Police, agents carried out the operation after being alerted of the alleged actions of Terrell Patterson. Houma man accused of setting house on fire with wife, dog inside According to HPD officers, Patterson is accused of distributing heroin in the 100 block of Acklen Avenue. An arrest warrant was issued and Patterson was arrested during a traffic stop. A search of his home allegedly led to the discovery of: Approximately 5.9 ounces of methamphetamine (Street value of $9,000) CDS IV prescription pills Approximately 4 ounces of Heroin/Fentanyl (Street value of $6,000) Several items of drug paraphernalia indicative of packaging and weighing illegal narcotics Nine years later, Algiers murder on Kent Drive remains unsolved Patterson has since been booked on charges of distribution of heroin and transactions involving proceeds derived from drug trend already identified among 'Generation Beta' babies, BabyCenter claims Eight people shot within nine hours in New Orleans Two dead in Lower Ninth Ward homicide investigation Boil water advisory issued in New Orleans after 30″ main break How do the chemicals in sunscreen protect our skin from damage? Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Time of India
21 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Trump ends special protections for 500,000 Haitians: ‘Deport them…' - The Economic Times Video
The Trump administration has officially announced the termination of deportation protections for over 500,000 Haitians living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that TPS for Haitians will expire on August 3, 2025. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that conditions in Haiti have improved, justifying the rollback of protections.
