# Homeland Security Investigations **Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)** is the criminal-investigative arm of [[ICE]] within the [[Department of Homeland Security]], with about 7,100 special agents. Its jurisdiction is among the broadest in federal law enforcement: customs and trade fraud, narcotics and weapons smuggling, human trafficking, child exploitation, money laundering, cybercrime and intellectual property, alongside immigration crime. Its agents are posted in dozens of countries. It was assembled in 2003, when the new DHS merged the investigators of the U.S. Customs Service with those of the INS, and it took the HSI name in 2010. ICE thus holds two very different workforces under one roof: HSI, which investigates crimes, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which arrests and deports. In June 2018, nineteen senior HSI agents asked Secretary [[Kirstjen Nielsen]] to split the agency in two. They argued that ERO's deportation mission was damaging their ability to work with local police and foreign partners. ## The 2025 re-mission The second Trump administration did the opposite of a split. It pointed HSI at deportation. Section 4 of Executive Order 14159, "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" (Jan. 20, 2025) directs the Secretary to "ensure that the primary mission" of HSI is enforcing the laws on "illegal entry and unlawful presence of aliens." That order rewrote the job of an agency built mainly for other crimes. The numbers followed. ICE records reported by the Cato Institute in September 2025 showed about **6,198 of HSI's roughly 7,100 agents**, nearly 90%, assisting immigration enforcement. That was a larger share than any other federal agency pulled into the effort (the DEA was about half, the ATF about 70%). The *Wall Street Journal* reported agents who investigate child exploitation being redirected to immigration work. On Jan. 6, 2026, Sen. [[Ron Wyden]] and colleagues demanded a list of child-exploitation, trafficking, cyber and drug investigations that had been paused or dropped as a result. ## The other half of the inversion The vault's second reason to track HSI runs the other direction. HSI operates under a lower internal threshold for opening a criminal investigation than the [[FBI]], and in the second term it has been used on small, politically useful cases outside its traditional work. The anchor example is [[United States v. Soriano]], a federal [[SNAP]] trafficking prosecution with charged conduct of **$277**, a category historically handled by local prosecutors or by administrative disqualification from the program. Taken together, the two moves make the pattern described at [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]]. Investigators are pulled off complex financial and exploitation crime, and the same agency's tools are applied to tiny benefit cases involving the poor. ## The voter-fraud line of effort (2025–26) ICE documents released in October 2026 show HSI running a voter-fraud program as a formal "strategic line of effort." By May 2026 it had taken in 50.6 million records from DOJ, 48.4 million obtained by DHS official [[Heather Honey]], and 26,235 USCIS-derived records, and sent the data to its iLab "for identification of high-value targets." HSI reviewed voter-registration nonprofits in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio and Minnesota, worked with the [[FBI]] on an Ohio canvassing firm, and weighed undercover operations against registration groups. Its own talking points in the same files say "ICE does not possess independent authority to administer or oversee elections." Full record: [[ICE Voter Records Collection]]. ## See also - [[ICE]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[DHS Component Tree]] · [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]] - [[United States v. Soriano]] · [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] · [[Spending Gap - Fighting Fraud vs. the $277 Indictment]] - [[Trump Corruption News Log]] · [[Joe Simonson]] · [[Andrew Ferguson]]