There have been a slew of articles in recent days about how DHS and DOJ are neglecting important concerns to instead chase Stephen Miller’s racist fever dreams.
NYT has a long piece summarizing the stories we’ve heard piecemeal of 60 DOJ lawyers who’ve left. MS-NOW reveals that an FBI SWAT team is babysitting Kash’s girlfriend.
And NYT has a story that incorporates FOIAed data with interviews about what DHS investigators aren’t doing because they are instead chasing migrants.
Homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time, hampering their pursuit of child predators.
A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.
And federal efforts to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking have languished with investigators reassigned to help staff deportation efforts.
[snip]
Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years, according to a Times analysis of data obtained through the F.O.I.A. lawsuit.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist who helped create software used by law enforcement and technology companies to detect child sexual abuse material. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children.”
It includes a story of a child who got lost as agents were pulled off to chase immigrants.
Earlier this year, special agents at Homeland Security Investigations found online videos showing violent sexual abuse of an unidentified young child.
Trained to hunt down pedophiles who use the internet to distribute illegal imagery, the H.S.I. agents spent weeks analyzing the footage to try to identify the child and infiltrate the online networks that had shared and may have directed the abuse, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.
But the agents working the case have since been asked to go out in the field and help arrest undocumented immigrants. The reassignment has hindered progress toward identifying and rescuing the child, said this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. The person said that the agents, no longer able to spend as much time undercover online, had lost contact with a key source they had cultivated over years in the online world of abusers.
But the story that really brings the misplaced priority home for me is this criminal complaint, noted in the latest CourtWatch, charging an American citizen with assault “involving physical contact” for spitting at — and filming — a Supervisory Border Patrol Agent in the parking lot of an Anaheim Home Depot on November 6.
When I first saw the picture accusing Robert Cortez of being the one guy out of 15 protesting Border Patrol in that parking lot of being the guy who spat at “JA” (as the alleged spitee is called), somehow managing to first “hit his right arm and [then] splash onto his face,” on what appears to be his left side, I couldn’t see the spit in the picture in the affidavit at all.
I see it there, now, on the strap of his helmet.
It’s the affiant’s day job — hunting child exploitation — that gets me.
3. I have been employed as a Special Agent (“SA”) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) since 2023, and I am currently assigned to the Child Exploitation Investigations Group in Orange County. Prior to my employment as a Special Agent, I was employed as a Border Patrol Agent with USBP from 2018-2021. My responsibilities as a Special Agent include investigating crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors, including, but not limited to, offenses involving travel in foreign commerce to engage in sexually explicit conduct with minors, and offenses involving the production, possession, distribution, and transportation of child pornography.
This guy’s day job is hunting down assholes who rape children.
Instead of doing that, he is avenging poor JS, who might feel shame for being filmed — and spat on — while snatching workers from a Home Depot parking lot.
And now DOJ is going to spend time and money to try to cage this guy for trying to shame those snatching his neighbors.