Under Patel, FBI heightens focus on violent crime, illegal immigration. Other threats abound, too

WASHINGTON — When federal authorities 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 participated in 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 and field offices have been directed to commit manpower to the issue.

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.

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 fugitives 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 faith in the bureau had eroded 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 consider the fight against transnational gangs 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 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.''