Under Patel, FBI heightens focus on violent crime, illegal immigration.
Other threats abound, too
[June 09, 2025]
By ERIC TUCKER
WASHINGTON (AP) — When the FBI arrested an accused leader of the MS-13
gang, Kash Patel was there to announce the case, trumpeting it as a step
toward returning "our communities to safety.”
Weeks later, when the Justice Department announced the seizure of $510
million in illegal narcotics bound for the U.S, the FBI director joined
other law enforcement leaders in front of a Coast Guard ship in Florida
and stacks of intercepted drugs to highlight the haul.
His presence was meant to signal the premium the FBI is placing on
combating violent crime, drug trafficking and illegal immigration,
concerns that have leapfrogged up the agenda in what current and former
law enforcement officials say amounts to a rethinking of priorities and
mission at a time when the country is also confronting increasingly
sophisticated national security threats from abroad.
A revised FBI priority list on its website places “Crush Violent Crime”
at the top, bringing the bureau into alignment with the vision of
President Donald Trump, who has made a crackdown on illegal immigration,
cartels and transnational gangs a cornerstone of his administration.
Patel has said he wants to “get back to the basics.” His deputy, Dan
Bongino, says the FBI is returning to “its roots.”
Patel says the FBI remains focused on some of the same concerns,
including China, that have dominated headlines in recent years, and the
bureau said in a statement that its commitment to investigating
international and domestic terrorism has not changed. That intensifying
threat was laid bare over the past month by a spate of violent acts,
most recently a Molotov cocktail attack on a Colorado crowd by an
Egyptian man who authorities say overstayed his visa and yelled “Free
Palestine.”
“The FBI continuously analyzes the threat landscape and allocates
resources and personnel in alignment with that analysis and the
investigative needs of the Bureau,” the FBI said in a statement. “We
make adjustments and changes based on many factors and remain flexible
as various needs arise.”
Signs of restructuring abound. The Justice Department has disbanded an
FBI-led task force on foreign influence and the bureau has moved to
dissolve a key public corruption squad in its Washington field office,
people familiar with the matter have told The Associated Press. The
Trump administration, meanwhile, has proposed steep budget cuts for the
FBI, and there’s been significant turnover in leadership ranks as some
veteran agents with years of experience have been pushed from their
positions.
Some former officials are concerned the stepped-up focus on violent
crime and immigration — areas already core to the mission of agencies
including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement — risks deflecting attention from some of the
complicated criminal and national security threats for which the bureau
has long borne primary if not exclusive responsibility for
investigating.
“If you’re looking down five feet in front of you, looking for gang
members and I would say lower-level criminals, you’re going to miss some
of the more sophisticated strategic issues that may be already present
or emerging,” said Chris Piehota, who retired from the FBI in 2020 as an
executive assistant director.
A greater focus on immigration
Enforcement of immigration laws has long been the principal jurisdiction
of immigration agents tasked with arresting people in the U.S. illegally
along with border agents who police points of entry.
Since Trump's inauguration, the FBI has assumed greater responsibility
for that work, saying it's made over 10,000 immigration-related arrests.
Patel has highlighted the arrests on social media, doubling down on the
administration's promise to prioritize immigration enforcement.
Agents have been dispatched to visit migrant children who crossed the
U.S-Mexico border without parents in what officials say is an effort to
ensure their safety. Field offices have been directed to commit manpower
to immigration enforcement.
The Justice Department has instructed the FBI to review files for
information about those illegally in the U.S. and provide it to the
Department of Homeland Security unless doing so would compromise an
investigation. And photos on the FBI’s Instagram account depict agents
with covered faces and tactical gear alongside detained subjects, with a
caption saying the FBI is “ramping up” efforts with immigration agents
to locate “dangerous criminals.”
“We’re giving you about five minutes to cooperate,” Bongino said on Fox
News about illegal immigrants. “If you’re here illegally, five minutes,
you’re out.”
That's a rhetorical shift from prior leadership. Though Patel’s direct
predecessor, Christopher Wray, warned about the flow of fentanyl through
the southern border and the possibility migrants determined to commit
terrorism could illegally cross through, he did not characterize
immigration enforcement as core to the FBI's mission.
A mandate to ‘crush violent crime’
There's precedent for the FBI to rearrange priorities to meet evolving
threats, though for the past two decades countering terrorism has
remained a constant atop the agenda.
Then-Director Robert Mueller transformed the FBI after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks into a national security, intelligence-gathering agency.
Agents were reassigned from investigations into drugs, violent crime and
white-collar fraud to fight terrorism. In a top 10 priority list from
2002, protecting the U.S. from terrorism was first. Fighting violent
crime was near the bottom, above only supporting law enforcement
partners and technology upgrades.
The FBI’s new list of priorities places “Crush Violent Crime” as a top
pillar alongside “Defend the Homeland," though FBI leaders have also
sought to stress that counterterrorism remains the bureau's principal
mandate.
Wray often said he was hard-pressed to think of a time when the FBI was
facing so many elevated threats at once. At the time of his departure
last January, the FBI was grappling with elevated terrorism concerns;
Iranian assassination plots on U.S. soil; Chinese spying and hacking of
Americans' cell phones; ransomware attacks against hospitals; and
Russian influence operations aimed at sowing disinformation.
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FBI Director Kash Patel speaks during a news conference at the
Manassas FBI Field Office, March 27, 2025, in Manassas, VA. (AP
Photo/Rod Lamkey, File)
Testifying before lawmakers last month, Patel took care to note the
surge in terrorism threats following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on
Israel by Hamas and a Chinese espionage threat he said had yielded
investigations in each of the bureau’s offices. But the
accomplishments he dwelled on first concerned efforts to “take
dangerous criminals off our streets,” including the arrests of three
suspects on the “Ten Most Wanted” list, and large drug seizures.
Rounding out the priority list are two newcomers: “Rebuild Public
Trust” and “Fierce Organizational Accountability.”
Those reflect claims amplified by Patel and Bongino that the bureau
had become politicized through its years of investigations of Trump,
whose Mar-a-Lago home was searched by agents for classified
documents in 2022. Close allies of Trump, both men have committed to
disclose files from past investigations, including into Russian
election interference and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S.
Capitol, that have fueled grievances against the bureau.
They've also pledged to examine matters that have captivated
attention in conservative circles, like the leak of a draft Supreme
Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. Employees have spent
hours poring over documents from the sex trafficking case against
financier Jeffrey Epstein, a favorite subject of conspiracy
theorists, to prepare them for release.
Patel had forecast his interest in rejiggering priorities long
before becoming director, including by saying that if he ran the
bureau, he would “let good cops be good cops” and push agents into
the field. A critic as a House Republican staffer of the FBI's
Trump-Russia investigation, which he calls an example of politicized
law enforcement, he had said that he would support breaking off the
FBI's “intel shops” to focus on crime-fighting.
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisor, said he would like to see
more specific information about the new priorities but was heartened
by an enhanced violent crime focus so long as other initiatives
weren’t abandoned.
“Mission priorities change,” Gagliano said. “The threat matrix
changes. You’ve got to constantly get out in front of that.”
Terrorism threats persist
The Trump administration has touted several terrorism successes,
including the arrests of a suspected participant in a suicide
bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 American servicemembers
and of an ex-Michigan National Guard member on charges of plotting a
military base attack on behalf of the Islamic State.
But the administration is also employing a broad definition of what
it believes constitutes terrorism.
FBI and Justice Department officials see the fight against
transnational gangs as part of their counterterrorism mandate,
taking advantage of the Trump administration’s designation of the
violent street gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist
organizations to bring terrorism-related charges against defendants,
including a Venezuelan man suspected of being a high-ranking TdA
member and a Utah father-son suspected of providing material support
to a Mexican cartel — a charge typically used for cases involving
groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida.
A former Justice Department terrorism prosecutor, Patel has called
the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces — interagency units in the
bureau’s 55 field offices — as “shining examples” of its mission.
Those task forces spent years pursuing suspects in the Capitol riot
but have now been enlisted to track down cartel members, he has
said.
After an Egyptian man whose work authorization in the U.S. had
expired was arrested on charges of using a homemade flamethrower and
Molotov cocktails to attack a group drawing attention to Israeli
hostages in Gaza, administration officials held up the case as proof
of their philosophy that immigration enforcement is tantamount to
protecting national security.
The FBI says its domestic terrorism investigations continue
uninterrupted, though Patel at times has discussed the threat in
different terms than Wray, who led the bureau as it investigated the
Capitol riot and who cited it as evidence of the dangers of
homegrown extremists. At hearings last month, Patel pointed to a
string of arsons and vandalism acts at Tesla dealerships as domestic
terrorism acts that commanded the FBI's resources and attention.
As it reconfigures its resources, the FBI has moved to reassign some
agents focused on domestic terrorism to a new task force set up to
investigate the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath, according to
people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity
to discuss personnel moves.
One national security concern Patel has preached continuity on in
public is the threat from China, which he said in a recent Fox News
interview keeps him up at night. Wray often called China the gravest
long-term threat to national security, and when he stepped aside in
January the FBI was contending with an espionage operation that gave
officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations
of an unknown number of Americans.
There are signs of a broader national security realignment.
A task force tracking foreign influence, like Russia’s attempts to
interfere in American democracy, was disbanded and the Justice
Department has scaled back criminal enforcement of a statute
requiring registration of U.S. lobbying on behalf of foreign
entities.
All of that concerns retired FBI supervisor Frank Montoya, a
longtime counterintelligence official who says fentanyl and drug
cartels are not “existential” threats in the same way Russia and
China are. When it comes to complicated, interagency espionage work,
the FBI, he said, has always “been the glue that made it all work.”
Patel makes no apologies for priorities he says come from the White
House.
“President Trump has set some priorities out in a new focus for
federal law enforcement,” he has said. “The FBI has heard those
directions, and we are determined to deliver on our crime-fighting
and national security mission with renewed vigor.”
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