DOJ Dropped 23000 Criminal Cases Including Terrorism Investigations as FBI Resources Shift to Immigration Enforcement

The Justice Department closed more than 23,000 criminal cases without prosecution in the first six months of the Trump administration, according to a ProPublica analysis of two decades of DOJ data declinations-criminal-investigations" data-rt="primary" data-mbfc="high" data-otype="digital_news">1. The declinations included over 1,300 terrorism and national security cases, nearly 5,000 drug-related cases and more than 900 federal fraud cases, all while the department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the same period, nearly triple the Biden-era rate 1. Nearly 11,000 cases were declined in February 2025 alone, nearly twice the prior monthly record, after a memo ordered prosecutors to review all cases opened before October 2022 within 10 days; former prosecutors told ProPublica they could not recall precedent for the directive 1. A DOJ spokesperson attributed the numbers to a data-cleaning effort and said the department remains committed to prosecuting all crime types 1. Responding to the report, retired CIA senior operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos said counterterrorism professionals are alarmed by the resource shift, warning on social media that finite FBI capacity is being redirected from counterterrorism to immigration enforcement 2.