President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown siphoned manpower away from the federal government’s fight against drug smugglers, leading to a steep drop in fentanyl seizures by a key agency inside the Department of Homeland Security, a recent watchdog report found.

DHS’s Office of Inspector General found that fentanyl seizures by Homeland Security Investigations plummeted 39% between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, while the number of fentanyl investigations fell by 24%. The number of hours the agency spent on combating fentanyl dropped by nearly a third.

HSI falls under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of DHS, though its duties traditionally go well beyond immigration. It is responsible for investigating all kinds of transnational criminal networks, including drug and weapons smugglers, human traffickers and terrorist groups.

The inspector general, which serves as DHS’s official watchdog, said in the Aug. 20 report that the reason for the drop in fentanyl cases inside HSI was clear: “As ICE shifted priorities toward immigration enforcement, HSI’s level of effort on fentanyl declined.”

“At one office, 'approximately 99%' of HSI’s staff was steered toward Trump’s deportation campaign, 'leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations.'”

HuffPost reported in July 2025 that the administration was draining manpower away from the nation’s borders and ports of entry in order to juice the number of deportations, a move that was bound to come at the expense of anti-drug-trafficking operations.

Trump had promised during the presidential campaign to deliver a historic surge in immigration arrests, but the administration found they did not have enough bodies to carry it out.

Though the inspector general report focuses on HSI, the same dynamic played out inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Border Patrol, which are also part of DHS. Thousands of agents and officers in those agencies were pulled off their normal duties and enlisted in inland immigration raids.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized the shift in focus in a post on X Tuesday.

“Trump’s DHS took a step back from seizing Fentanyl so that ICE could terrorize our streets,” Warren said, referencing the inspector general statistics.

Trump has described fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” that’s “flooding into our country.”

A DHS spokesperson said in an email that the agency was working to “track metrics and execute goals to assess how well ICE-HSI is combating fentanyl,” and that it recently implemented an action plan on the issue.

“Homeland Security Investigations has continued to carry out their action plan to combat fentanyl despite inconsistent funding for the program due to multiple Democrat shutdowns,” the spokesperson said. “For operational security reasons, ICE does not disclose law enforcement sensitive details.”

The inspector general found that the agency’s hours devoted to fentanyl investigations “steadily increased” between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, when former President Joe Biden was in office, but then declined “by more than 250,000 hours,” or 31%, during fiscal year 2025, most of which was under Trump.

At the same time, the hours HSI devoted to “alien immigration investigations” exploded, from 207,000 to nearly 2 million.

The report describes deporting immigrants and combating fentanyl trafficking as “competing mission priorities” for the Trump administration last year.

“During interviews with agents from 11 HSI field offices, agents in 9 offices reported that the shift in priorities toward immigration enforcement reduced capacity on fentanyl investigations,” it states.

Agents told interviewers that immigration had become an “all hands on deck” mission starting in January 2025, when Trump was inaugurated. At one office, “approximately 99%” of HSI’s staff was steered toward Trump’s deportation campaign, “leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations.”

“A drug investigation team of seven agents was reduced to ‘two to three’ because personnel were reassigned to work on immigration cases,” the report noted.

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