Might other federal criminal prosecutions decline significantly with increased focus on immigration enforcement?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this new Reuters article headlined "Exclusive: Thousands of agents diverted to Trump immigration crackdown." Here are a few excerpts from a lengthy article:

Federal agents who usually hunt down child abusers are now cracking down on immigrants who live in the U.S. illegally.  Homeland Security investigators who specialize in money laundering are raiding restaurants and other small businesses looking for immigrants who aren’t authorized to work.  Agents who pursue drug traffickers and tax fraud are being reassigned to enforce immigration law.

As U.S. President Donald Trump pledges to deport “millions and millions” of “criminal aliens,” thousands of federal law enforcement officials from multiple agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime-fighting resources away on other areas — from drug trafficking and terrorism to sexual abuse and fraud....

This account of Trump’s push to reorganize federal law enforcement — the most significant since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former federal agents, attorneys and other federal officials.... "I do not recall ever seeing this wide a spectrum of federal government resources all being turned toward immigration enforcement," said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former Homeland Security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.  "When you're telling agencies to stop what you've been doing and do this now, whatever else they were doing takes a back seat."...

Before this year, ATF had played almost no role in immigration enforcement.  It typically investigated firearms offenses, bombings, arson and illicit shipments of alcohol and tobacco.  But since Trump’s inauguration, about 80% of its roughly 2,500 agents have been ordered to take on at least some immigration enforcement tasks, two officials familiar with ATF's operations said.  The ATF agents are being used largely as “fugitive hunters” to find migrants living in the U.S. illegally, one of the officials said.

The DEA, whose roughly 10,000 staff have led the nation’s efforts to battle drug cartels, has shifted about a quarter of its work to immigration operations, said a former official briefed by current DEA leaders on the changes.  Two other former officials described the commitment as “substantial” but did not know precisely how much work shifted....

On the second day of Trump’s administration, a top Justice Department official, Emil Bove, told federal prosecutors in a memo that they should “take all steps necessary” to prosecute illegal immigrants for crimes in the U.S. In the memo, Bove called for increasing the number of immigration prosecutions, and said any cases that are declined must be urgently reported to the Justice Department.

As a result, federal prosecutors, who typically handle a variety of crimes, have been inundated with immigration cases, two of the sources said.  In San Diego, the number of people charged in federal court in February with felony immigration crimes more than quadrupled compared to the previous year, a Reuters examination of federal court records found.  The number of people charged with felony drug crimes dropped slightly over the same period.  In Detroit — where immigration prosecutions have been rare — the number of people charged with immigration offenses rose from two in February 2024 to 19 last month, Reuters found.

Just this past week, I posted here the Bureau of Justice Statistics' publication "Federal Justice Statistics, 2023," and the first three figures in that publication provide an interesting and helpful accounting of federal criminal caseloads over the past decade and more.  Figures 2 and 3 especially highlight that there is not an inherent "zero-sum" reality to the number of criminal immigration cases and other criminal cases in the federal system.  So it is certainly possible that immigration enforcement actions can go up significantly without other federal criminal cases going down significantly.

That all said, there is a reasonable basis to predict that at least two major categories of federal criminal case processing, namely firearm and fraud offenses, may be relatively low priorities in the Trump Administration.  (Also, I suspect some of the post-Bruen/Rahimi Second Amendment litigation might have some impact on some federal firearm prohibition enforcement caseloads.)  As for drug cases, I am not quite sure what to expect or predict with caseloads: fentanyl prosecutions seem a likely priority, but meth and cocaine cases have made up the bulk of the federal drug docket for the last decade (though the number of fentanyl cases have increased the most in recent years). 

Long story short, federal criminal justice and sentencing fans have a lot to watch in this space (and in lots of other spaces).