Since February, multiple news reports have alleged that a significant number of agents at Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative wing that focuses on transnational crimes like child exploitation, human trafficking, and drug cartels—have been pulled from child exploitation cases and reassigned to immigration enforcement and arrests.
US senator Ron Wyden urged DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari on Tuesday to “promptly” launch an investigation into the veracity and extent of these reports about HSI, in a letter shared exclusively with WIRED. Inspector General Cuffari has the authority to conduct audits or investigations into any activities or operations at DHS.
“Instead of locking up rapists, child predators and other violent criminals, [US president Donald] Trump appears to be diverting investigators to target cooks, farm workers and students,” Wyden says in the letter. “Congress and the American people will not tolerate the Trump administration ignoring the ongoing sexual abuse of vulnerable children. Accordingly, we urge you to promptly investigate these troubling reports.”
Wyden told WIRED in a written statement that there is “no excuse for pulling investigators away from the most heinous cases involving child exploitation,” adding that “nothing should be a higher priority than protecting kids in danger.”
WIRED contacted several US-based child welfare and advocacy organizations to provide a comment for this article, but they did not reply or declined to comment on the record. An official from one of these organizations, who requested anonymity, claimed that their organization could not provide a comment for this story due to fear of retribution from the Trump administration.
In February, USA Today reported that the “entire investigations division” of HSI would be shifting its focus primarily to immigration arrests and deportations, as opposed to its typical range of work. Then, Reuters in March reported that HSI agents had been actively “reassigned” from cases they had been working on related to child exploitation, money laundering cases, drug trafficking, and tax fraud. They were then tasked with immigration enforcement. At the time, Democratic senator Dick Durbin told the outlet that this shift was “wasteful, misguided diversion of resources” that was “making America less safe.”
The Atlantic reported in July that a veteran HSI agent said the division was putting major criminal investigations on hold and sometimes choosing not to take on new cases—including drug cases, human trafficking cases, and child exploitation cases—in order to make agents available for routine predawn raids for immigration enforcement.
HSI’s reported shift in priorities comes after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said that it had received 20.5 million tips of suspected child sexual exploitation in 2024.
The risk to children involving AI-generated abuse material—which is also the domain of HSI—could also be reaching crisis levels. In 2024, the NCMEC received about 67,000 tips about suspected AI-generated abuse material—a 1,325 percent increase from 2023, when it received 4,700 of these tips.
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