As President Donald Trump pushes federal law enforcement toward an immigration crackdown, agents and prosecutors fear he’s drawing resources from one of the most vulnerable groups: victims of child sexual exploitation online.
Current and former government employees tell The Verge that the Trump administration’s laser focus on border security threatens to strain investigations into online crimes against children. Agents, including in departments that work on child safety, are being reassigned or given extra caseloads. Prosecutors are finding themselves spread thin. One former agent at Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), who like others in this article was granted anonymity to discuss the inner workings of government agencies, says it’s not out of the ordinary for federal agents to be shuffled amid changing priorities — “but this, for a single priority shift, or single case here, this is probably the biggest I’ve seen.”
HSI, a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has long played a key role in investigating child exploitation crimes. The agency fought for and secured distinct branding from ICE last year before Trump took office, “to work without the undue toxicity that in some places comes with the ICE moniker,” ICE acting director Patrick Lechleitner said at the time. But reports from Reuters and USA Today have found that thousands of federal law enforcement agents, including from HSI, have been told to focus efforts and resources on administration priorities, including immigration enforcement. Current and former government sources confirm the shift in priorities to The Verge.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin did not address a question from The Verge about how many agents had been assigned to work immigration cases outside of their typical workload. “Nearly every day ICE arrests pedophiles, kidnappers, child smugglers, and sex traffickers, including those who entered our country illegally,” McLaughlin said in a statement, pointing as an example to the arrest of Honduran citizen Olvin Rodriguez-Inestroza, who recently pleaded guilty to distributing child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. She also said HSI was “leading efforts” to conduct welfare checks on minors who crossed the border unaccompanied.
“In their attempt to show how strong they are on this topic, are taking resources from things that are so vitally important”
As more employees take on added immigration enforcement responsibilities, people The Verge spoke with said they fear an already intractable problem could compound, even if agents actively working child exploitation cases aren’t the ones immediately reassigned. “This administration, in their attempt to show how strong they are on this topic, are taking resources from things that are so vitally important, and such a threat to this country,” says Brock Nicholson, a retired HSI agent. “You can only stretch your ability so far, and if you’re trying to do more with less, at a certain point, you’re just going to do less.”
The past half-decade has seen child exploitation investigators facing a rapidly growing volume of potential criminal material reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which operates a national report clearinghouse called the CyberTipline. Back in 2019, the CyberTipline received 16.9 million reports from tech companies and members of the public. In 2022, it saw about 32 million reports, and in 2023, it saw 36.2 million. Last year saw a relative drop to 20.5 million, but NCMEC believes that’s due partly to giants like Meta moving toward end-to-end encryption, which makes incidents harder to track.
Do you work in law enforcement or have information to share about the government’s response to online child exploitation? Reach out securely and anonymously with tips from a non-work device to Lauren Feiner via Signal at laurenfeiner.64.
CyberTipline reports often alert the government to explicit images of children being passed around the internet, a crime in its own right and sometimes evidence of other still-ongoing abuse. NCMEC also passes along evidence of practices like sextortion, where children are coerced into sending sexual images and financially extorted to keep them private. Increasingly, it’s fielding reports of sexual images created with generative AI.
A December 2022 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, however, found that the Justice Department — which prosecutes cases of alleged child exploitation investigated by agents like those at HSI — had failed to prioritize a national strategy for tackling threats posed by new technology and was not meeting all of its statutory requirements from the 2008 PROTECT Our Children Act, which aimed to strengthen law enforcement response to internet child exploitation crimes. DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement to The Verge that the DOJ had released a national strategy in June of 2023 and is currently working on the next update, which “will reflect the continued prioritization of efforts of the Department and its partners to combat child exploitation.”
John Pizzuro, CEO of lobbying group Raven, which advocates for more law enforcement funding to combat child exploitation, says that even before Trump, “the problem is that the priority has never been child exploitation.” Over his 25-year career in law enforcement, including leading the New Jersey Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, Pizzuro says child exploitation has been “the least-prioritized crime aspect in law enforcement, bar none.”
“The problem is that the priority has never been child exploitation”
The new administration has in at least one case cut back on what many enforcers see as a valuable resource. A flagship DOJ-hosted training conference, the National Law Enforcement Training on Child Exploitation, was canceled this year with little public explanation; one source speculates it was a casualty of a DOGE-related funding freeze. Baldassarre did not provide a reason for the conference’s cancellation, nor confirm whether it was related to DOGE cuts, but said in a statement, “This Department of Justice can remain focused on two critical priorities at the same time: prosecute criminals who exploit children and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”
One DOJ official says that when Trump came into office, “we saw the priorities shift dramatically towards immigration. It was like everything was immigration-related.” As investigative agents the DOJ works with saw their focus diverted to helping with immigration enforcement, the official says, “all of their cases, all of their investigations, come to a grinding halt.”
These delays can mean the difference between building a case against a predator and letting the trail go cold. A stalled investigation looks like everything from an agent waiting longer to review evidence to a grand jury subpoena’s results sitting in their inbox unchecked. There are set limits on how long investigators can hold on to a phone or computer they’re examining for evidence, and the DOJ official says a judge is unlikely to grant more than one or two time extensions.
The statute of limitations for some CSAM cases runs out after five years, a deadline that, the official recalls, was already sometimes difficult to meet. “It’s not because these are complicated cases,” the official says. “These are some of the simplest, [most] straightforward cases. It’s just that they were kind of backlogged, because there’s not a lot of agents who want to do these cases. It’s not a priority for the agencies, and it takes a long time with the limited resources.”
The Trump administration has deprioritized some non-immigration operations at the DOJ, like certain kinds of white-collar crime enforcement. But that hasn’t left more resources for online child exploitation. When another DOJ official saw their section’s work downscaled earlier this year, they were presented with a list of transfer options, including work on issues like violent crime and human smuggling. The Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) was not on the list.
Baldassarre did not confirm or dispute this point, and declined to provide staffing numbers for CEOS, citing a policy against discussing personnel. “Keeping children safe from sexual abuse and exploitation is a Department priority,” she said in a statement. She also said that more child exploitation cases had been charged between October 2024 and July 2025 than during the same period a year earlier, jumping from 2,494 to 2,676, and pointed to the DOJ’s “tens of millions of dollars in funding to NCMEC, the ICAC task forces, and organizations committed to protecting American children.”
“They seem to believe we live in a world of unlimited resources, and that’s just not where we are”
Amid the shift in focus to immigration, the Trump administration has reportedly purged DOJ lawyers who worked on cases that implicated the president. And even more have left the agency after taking deferred resignation offers — CBS News reported in June that 4,000 DOJ employees took the so-called Fork in the Road agreements. “They seem to believe we live in a world of unlimited resources, and that’s just not where we are,” the second DOJ official says, noting a steady stream of goodbye party messages or LinkedIn posts of colleagues leaving the agency this year. “At the same time, they’re expecting all of us to be pumping out these numbers on immigration and guns and drugs cases. And it’s just not feasible to do both what they are expecting there, and do what I view as equally — if not more — priority work of the cyber crimes and the white-collar stuff.”
Another federal law enforcement officer says that the added workload of immigration cases means “I’m burning both ends of the stick.” As a result, “it’s just created a situation where we have to triage what the worst of the worst is, and maybe some of the other stuff has to sit. It still gets worked, it just has to sit a little longer.”
Trump and many of his supporters have loudly and frequently claimed to fight child exploitation, invoking both real incidents — like the abuses of Jeffrey Epstein — to imaginary ones, like the elaborate conspiracy theories of QAnon. (Trump was once friends with Epstein and has been accused of participating in the abuse as well, though his administration has denied any allegations and insisted he has nothing to hide.) But that hasn’t translated into the same kind of focus the administration has paid to immigration so far.
Much of the conversation about protecting kids online in recent years has revolved around the role tech platforms should play. Trump signed the Take It Down Act, which, in addition to criminalizing nonconsensual intimate images of adults and children, requires sites to quickly remove them. Congress came close last year to passing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would place an onus on tech platforms to safeguard kids from certain harms, until Republican House leadership blocked it from a full vote.
Given the scale of the problem of CSAM and other online abuse, trying to attack it at the source may make sense. But Maureen Flatley, an advocate for enforcement funding, warns that undue focus on the companies responsible for most of the tips to NCMEC can distract from the pressing challenge of going after the actual criminals at issue. “At the end of the day, Mark Zuckerberg can’t investigate the Yahoo boys. He can’t issue search warrants. He can’t arrest anybody,” Flatley says of the Meta CEO.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) previously introduced the Invest in Child Safety Act to direct $5 billion toward this area of law enforcement. He tells The Verge he introduced it “to try to send a message that as a senior member of the Senate, I thought this was a priority, and I wanted to have a significant allocation of funds to get the talent. And consistently, since the Trump people have come in, they’ve taken us backwards, rather than make any forward progress.”
Wyden recently sent a letter to the DHS Inspector General asking to investigate the reported shifts in resourcing toward immigration at the expense of other areas, but says he’s yet to get a substantive response. “It just seems to me that the Trumpers are giving a path to rapists and child predators and ignoring the sexual abuse of these vulnerable young people to get their numbers up in terms of immigrants,” he says.
“It’s simple math: when you take resources from doing that and do other things, an under-prioritized area is even more under-prioritized,” says Nicholson. “And it just strikes me, shouldn’t those kids be our biggest priority, not our least priority?”
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