US Politics
Gun and drug charges are plummeting as Trump shifts focus to immigration, records show
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Despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that his mass deportation campaign is a major crime-fighting operation, the president’s anti-immigration agenda has stalled the prosecution of serious gun and drug charges across the country.
In the first four months of the year, federal prosecutors filed only eight gun or drug cases, compared to 77 cases in the same period last year, according to an analysis by Reuters.
Prosecutors have charged 90 people with a broader range of felonies in that time, about half as many as a year earlier. These include allegations against journalist Don Lemon, who is charged in connection with a protest inside a Minneapolis church, while another 17 cases involved immigration offenses, Reuters found.
U.S. attorney’s offices are scrambling after a mass exodus of career prosecutors at the Department of Justice, which has quietly abandoned thousands of criminal cases. Since Trump took office, his administration has shifted an enormous amount of federal firepower into immigration enforcement, The Independent previously reported.
With a diminished fleet of government lawyers, and a more explicit focus on immigration-related prosecutions, the Justice Department has dropped thousands of cases despite Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign pillar of being “tough on crime.”
“You can’t tell me that sex trafficking and drug trafficking and that kind of thing is less important than people going into a church to protest,” Minnesota’s Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told Reuters. “It’s a public safety issue that they’re not doing the types of prosecutions they should be doing.”
DOJ spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre told Reuters that “assisting our partners with immigration enforcement has not impacted our ability to investigate and swiftly prosecute other crimes.”
The Independent has requested additional comment from the Justice Department.
Moriarty’s office is leading what appears to be the first criminal case in the country against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer for their actions during a violent Minneapolis blitz, which resulted in thousands of arrests and the death of two protesters who were fatally shot by federal agents.
That surge of federal agents into U.S. cities sparked an avalanche of lawsuits from protesters and immigrants alike. Short-staffed U.S. Attorney’s offices are not only struggling to bring new criminal cases but also having difficulty managing the legal blowback from the administration’s immigration enforcement operation.
One government lawyer broke down in court earlier this year, telling a judge “this system sucks,” and the Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor in Minnesota admitted the caseload is “crushing” his office.
A wave of career attorneys resigned after federal law enforcement agencies rebuffed probes into ICE and instead tried to investigate the widow of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an agent in Minneapolis in January.
Their abrupt exits came as several lawyers also left the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Officials reportedly left in frustration over division chief Harmeet Dhillon’s refusal to investigate the shooting, which sparked widespread protests and political outrage.
The rash of departures across the Justice Department cut a team of roughly 50 federal prosecutors in Minnesota by half, according to Reuters, citing two people familiar with its staffing. Five of the six supervisors in the office’s criminal section also left, according to Reuters.
In some cases, federal prosecutors are either dropping charges altogether or taking the rare step of asking local prosecutors to take them up instead.
In February, a judge in Minneapolis dismissed a case against Tavon Timberlake, who was accused of being a felon in possession of a firearm. After prosecutors, citing staff shortages, missed several deadlines in the case, a judge tossed it out altogether, saying that Timberlake had been denied his right to a speedy trial.
Last month, government attorneys asked a Minnesota judge for permission to drop a case against a man accused of an armed carjacking in which two women were killed and a six-year-old boy was injured. State prosecutors are taking up the case instead, according to the Justice Department. A judge signed off on the switch last week.