WASHINGTON – In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), a senior member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, pressed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for answers about its apparent neglect of its responsibilities to combat illegal fentanyl trafficking. Her request follows a new Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report that found that ICE diverted significant personnel and resources away from counter-fentanyl and counter-cartel efforts under the Trump Administration – leading to a nearly 40 percent decrease in fentanyl seizures.
Click here to see the Senator’s full request and see coverage highlights in The Bulwark below:
The Bulwark: Morning Shots – Is ICE Dropping Fentanyl?
[...] The [DHS Inspector General] audit was grim in its assessment of HSI’s anti-fentanyl efforts last year, spotlighting a number of technological, intelligence, and information-sharing obstacles to anti-fentanyl work at the agency. But the most notable criticism had to do with manpower. “As ICE shifted priorities toward immigration enforcement, HSI’s level of effort on fentanyl declined,” the report reads. Amid the Trump administration’s all-hands-on-deck approach to immigration, fentanyl investigations regularly got short shrift: “At one office,” the report reads, “approximately 99 percent of HSI’s work was dedicated to immigration, leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations.”
[…] As Democrats look forward—they hope—to retaking Congress next year, they see fault lines like this as promising areas for investigation. Over the weekend, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who will become the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee next year, sent DHS a letter seeking more information about DHS’s fentanyl-investigation dip.
“In recent years, ICE has become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, with more than $100 billion in new funding since 2024—10 times its historical annual budget,” Hassan wrote. But the DHS OIG findings “raise significant concerns that ICE is neglecting its counter-fentanyl and counter-cartel missions.”
Hassan took issue with DHS’s “lack of urgency” on the topic, noting that the department had agreed only to figure out how to refocus agency resources by July 2027. The letter has not previously been reported.
The White House and DHS strongly disputed that its immigration focus had harmed its anti-drug efforts, arguing that Trump was winning the fight against fentanyl.
[…] But concerns that ICE is giving these operations short shrift originate with their own agents on the ground and their own department’s inspector general, not with congressional Democrats. Expect to hear much more on this topic as the spotlight shines brighter on DHS in the months ahead.
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