By America’s Voice | Editorial credit: Robert P. Alvarez / shutterstock.com

Washington, DC — Last week, we highlighted the high cost of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions and plans for indiscriminate mass deportations above all. Over the weekend, a USA Today story, “Thousands of DHS agents shift to deportation instead of drugs, weapons and human trafficking,” underscored the point and adds to the growing mountain of evidence that even real public safety threats are being deprioritized in the process.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:

“The Trump administration’s obsession to purge America of immigrants knows no bounds and comes at a very high cost to us all. As the USA Today story makes clear, DHS agents have been diverted from combating real threats to public safety like the scourge of fentanyl, among other dangerous drugs, gun running and stopping human traffickers from conducting their evil trade. Instead, Trump is prioritizing a quid pro quo deal with the Mayor of New York over immigration, and spending millions on mindless anti-immigrant ads – all at taxpayer expense and real threats.”

Last week, we noted that among the many high costs of the Trump administration’s obsession include: trampling on the rule of law; pardoning or ignoring actual criminal behavior; subverting many other policy priorities and actual public safety threats – including taking critical resources away from key domestic prioritie sand drug enforcement, combatting fentanyl and terrorism investigations – in favor of a focus on indiscriminate mass deportations; the negative economic and inflationary impacts of deporting key workers; and a failure to pursue real solutions to a broken immigration system in favor of chaos and cruelty. The USA Today story, by reporter Josh Meyer, adds more details, noting in part:

“The Department of Homeland Security has ordered its entire investigations division – composed of 6,000 agents – to divert focus on drug dealers, terrorists, and human traffickers and shift priority to the Trump administration’s mission of deporting people in the U.S. illegally, USA TODAY has learned. The new focus for DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations agency (HSI), current and former officials say, is in keeping with recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that demand a wholesale shift in federal law enforcement resources toward immigration crackdowns and removal.

But they warn the shift will undermine high-profile investigations into some of the most dangerous transnational threats Americans face, including Mexican drug cartels smuggling deadly fentanyl across the border from Mexico.

…Kenneth MacDonald, another former HSI supervisory agent and a former White House official, said other critical threats could go uninvestigated by HSI, which he described as the second largest U.S. federal investigative law enforcement agency after the FBI. Those include child exploitation crimes, cyberattacks and Dark Web financial schemes, Iranian and Chinese nuclear traffickers, Russian organized crime, trade fraud and sanctions investigations.

…The directive could also threaten ongoing investigations and prosecutions, many of which are multi-agency efforts that have been years in the making – like several ongoing cases against the Sinaloa Cartel and other Mexican and Chinese transnational crime syndicates, current and former officials said.”

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