Exclusive-How Trump’s Minneapolis immigration blitz hobbled federal crime fighting

By Brad Heath, Andrew Goudsward and Kristina Cooke

MINNEAPOLIS, May 7 (Reuters) – The Trump administration’s blitz of flooding Minnesota with immigration agents has also significantly slowed other federal investigations and prosecutions of a range of serious crimes, a Reuters review of federal court records found.

New gun and drug investigations have stopped. Many senior prosecutors resigned. Some federal agents disappeared from drug task forces and gang cases. Others have taken the unusual step of forwarding their investigations to government authorities.

US President Donald Trump touted the operation as an urgent crime-fighting effort targeting violent illegal immigrants. But the insurrection disrupted the orderly work of federal officials charged with protecting public safety, according to records and interviews with 10 current and former officials in state and federal law enforcement.

According to court records, between January and late April, federal prosecutors charged eight people with weapons or drug crimes; This compares with 77 people in the same period last year. Overall, prosecutors charged 90 people with felonies; this number was about half that of a year ago.

These felony cases involved 39 people, including journalist Don Lemon, who was accused of disrupting a church service during a protest against immigration crackdowns. Of the total criminal cases, 17 involved immigration offenses, such as returning to the United States after deportation. The cases do not include deportation proceedings, which are non-criminal and are heard in separate immigration courts.

Hennepin County Prosecutor Mary Moriarty, Minneapolis’ chief local prosecutor, told Reuters that the local U.S. Attorney’s Office was so hobbled by departures and diversions in immigration enforcement that U.S. agents began bringing complex cases to her office instead; This was a rare tactic for federal investigators.

“You can’t tell me that sex trafficking and drug trafficking and those kinds of things are less important than people going to church to protest,” Moriarty said. “It’s a public safety issue that they’re not doing the type of investigations they should be doing.”

Moriarty declined to identify the cases that federal investigators bring to his office out of concern about alienating their own agencies.

The crackdown on immigrants has become the nation’s latest flashpoint in the administration’s military-style policing strategy, with nearly 3,000 agents descending on the icy streets of Minneapolis starting in December. Agents pulled people out of cars and schools to deport them and fatally shot two U.S. citizen protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, sparking national outrage and eventually prompting the administration to withdraw from Minneapolis.

The slowdown in the city’s policing reflects a shift of greater U.S. crime-fighting resources to immigration enforcement, often detaining undocumented people with no criminal records. Nationwide, the number of people charged with immigration crimes last year was the highest in two decades, while the number charged with drug crimes was the lowest.

U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen in Minnesota did not respond to questions about the slowdown.

The Justice Department and the White House have not directly addressed court records that show a sharp decline in federal criminal investigations so far this year. Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said “assisting our partners with immigration enforcement did not impact our ability to investigate and expeditiously prosecute other crimes.” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump was “taking the necessary actions to prevent widespread fraud and illegal immigration in Minnesota.”

FEDERAL AID TO FIGHT LOCAL CRIME ‘NO MORE’

Federal authorities handle only a fraction of criminal cases in the United States, but they play a huge role in public safety because they have the time and resources to conduct tough investigations of the most dangerous criminals. Federal authorities have capabilities to track and trace suspected criminals that are not always available at the state level, for example, and they can more easily pursue conspiracies across state lines.

John Marti, a former federal prosecutor who once served as acting U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, said state and local authorities rely on the unique resources and reach of their federal partners.

“That’s not there anymore,” he said, because so many lawyers have left and the government has focused heavily on immigration. As a result, he said, more violent criminals “will not be caught and stopped”.

Law enforcement officials in Minnesota told Reuters the shift since the crackdown on immigration was so sudden it could have a lasting impact on traditional crime fighting. Federal authorities’ ability to pursue violent criminals could be hampered for years by the “ripple effects” of the administration’s intense focus on immigrants, an immigration enforcement official said.

Reuters used court records from Westlaw, a legal research service, to examine the impact of Trump’s immigration crackdown on federal law enforcement in Minnesota. Westlaw and Reuters are divisions of Thomson Reuters.

The news organization counted the cases in the federal district court’s criminal file in which the most serious issues were raised. It did not count cases brought before federal judges, who typically handle lower-level crimes. Reuters in some cases artificial intelligence to help categorize the charges people face. Examination of a random set of records showed that their assessments were 98% accurate.

Administration officials said the raid in Minneapolis was necessary to deter crimes, including a welfare fraud scandal dating back to 2022 that resulted in the prosecution of many Somali Americans.

But a Reuters review found that authorities brought two new cases of wire fraud to court between January and April, neither of which were related to government benefits. Federal and state law enforcement officials last week conducted a series of searches of welfare organizations in Minnesota that they described as part of a fraud investigation.

MISSING AGENTS AND LAWYERS

Although Minneapolis is not among the most dangerous cities in the United States, federal authorities there have made fighting violent crime one of their top priorities in recent years.

Shortly after the surge began in Minneapolis, some federal agents assigned to Minnesota began disappearing from drug enforcement taskforces and helping with immigration enforcement, local officials said, but they did not say how many. “They are experiencing significant disruption due to agent reassignment,” said Robert Small, executive director of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association.

Some agents had been diverted from street crime investigations to immigration before the surge, according to two people familiar with the matter. They said agents frequently reported being unavailable on some days while pursuing immigration enforcement.

The operation also led to a breakout from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, where many prosecutors left rather than follow orders to investigate Good’s widow, who was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

Later, other lawyers followed him. Those rapid departures left the office with about half its usual staff of about 50 lawyers, two people familiar with its staff told Reuters. Five of the six supervisors in the office’s criminal division have left, according to two people and one additional source; All of these people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

Since then, the Ministry of Justice has temporarily rotated a number of military lawyers and prosecutors from other states.

Still, the small number of federal prosecutors are struggling to bring new cases or even manage cases started before the immigration crackdown. In February, a judge in Minneapolis dismissed the case federal prosecutors filed against Tavon Timberlake, whom they accused last year of being a felon in possession of a firearm. After prosecutors sometimes missed deadlines, citing staffing shortages, the judge said Timberlake had been denied a speedy trial and ended the case.

Last week, federal prosecutors asked the court for permission to drop the case against a man accused of carjacking that killed two people and injured a six-year-old child, saying in a court filing that local prosecutors would pursue the charges instead.

Even as federal prosecutors scrambled to go after such serious crimes, they found time to arrest and charge dozens of people protesting Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. In addition to the felony charges related to the protest inside the church, prosecutors charged 40 more people with mostly low-level violations related to confrontations with federal agents. About half of the cases were quickly dismissed, court records show.

A lawyer familiar with the operations of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis noted that the office’s ability to pursue more traditional cases has been severely restricted: “They’re just trying to hang on.”

(Reporting by Brad Heath in Minneapolis, Andrew Goudsward in Washington and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Brian Thevenot)