Federal investigators tasked with hunting child sexual predators and other serious criminals have reportedly been diverted into rounding up undocumented immigrants as part of Donald Trump’s quest to turbocharge deportations.
The Department of Homeland Security has reassigned thousands of specialized federal agents to immigration dragnets, dramatically slowing investigations into child exploitation and sex trafficking, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
Agents are being pulled off high-priority criminal investigations, including national security threats, and sent on deportation missions, the newspaper reports.
Hany Farid, 58, a computer scientist who helped develop industry-standard tools to detect child abuse imagery, told the Times, “It’s heartbreaking.
“You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children.”
Another expert told the outlet that the change in policy could have “deadly” consequences.
The Times secured internal documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and interviewed more than 65 current and former officials.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the department’s criminal investigations unit and an arm of ICE, worked about 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February to April, according to the Times’ analysis.
In Los Angeles, an entire five-person child-exploitation unit was placed on immigration duty, leaving agents scrambling to keep cases alive on nights and weekends.
One high-priority investigation, involving violent online abuse of an unidentified young child, stalled after the agents tracking the perpetrator were reassigned to street arrests.
Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisted to the Times that “law enforcement has continued to rescue children from sex offenders and traffickers,” arguing that “child exploitation, human trafficking, terrorism, financial scams and smuggling all have a nexus to illegal immigration.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House deputy White House press secretary, told the Daily Beast that “any insinuation that the Trump administration isn’t successfully combating dangerous crime is false and uninformed.”
The internal data paints a very different picture. While child-exploitation work cratered, HSI agents spent at least five times as many hours on immigration operations as they did during Trump’s first term. Less than 40 percent of immigrants detained by ICE this year had any U.S. criminal conviction, with roughly 8 percent found guilty of a violent crime.
The Times also reports that Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of his deportation blitz, runs a daily 30-minute call with senior officials where he critiques ICE arrest tallies and demands escalations.
One former official said Miller’s directives “ripple across the entire DHS bureaucracy.”
The consequences extend beyond child abuse cases. Agents working Iran’s illicit oil network—used to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—told the Times that tankers and millions in revenue have slipped away because investigators were reassigned.
Coast Guard C-27 aircraft used for drug interdiction were redeployed to ferry detainees between ICE centers. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers delayed courses for agencies to prioritize deportation officer classes.
DHS intelligence production has also slowed, with far fewer terrorism briefings reaching state and local agencies.
David Lapan, a former DHS spokesperson under Trump, said: “DHS keeps being pulled further away from its core missions in protecting the homeland. These distractions could have deadly consequences.”
Trump allies, including former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli defended the changes as necessary to reset DHS’ priorities.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
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