Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration

Attorney General Pam Bondi's Justice Department closed more than 23,000 criminal investigations in its first six months, according to a ProPublica analysis of two decades of DOJ data, abandoning cases involving terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it redirected resources to immigration prosecutions. The spike is extraordinary: nearly 11,000 cases were declined in February 2025 alone—the highest monthly total since at least 2004—compared to a previous record of just over 6,500 in September 2019 during Trump's first term. The closed cases included investigations into nursing home patient abuse, labor union fraud, cryptocurrency fraud and years-long federal probes by the FBI and DEA into fentanyl suppliers. While the Trump administration prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases—nearly triple the Biden-era number—it pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other crime category than new administrations dating back to 2009, and declined over 900 federal fraud cases and more than 1,000 terrorism cases. The DOJ attributed the spike to a data "remediation" effort but did not answer questions about the types of cases declined or the February directive that ordered prosecutors to review and close cases within 10 days—a timeline one attorney said would typically take months.