BALTIMORE, Dec 22 (Reuters) – Detectives in Baltimore watched on security video last summer as an argument inside a convenience store spilled into the parking lot and gunshots erupted at a sedan speeding away. They quickly recognized one of the shooters: He had been shot himself two days earlier.
Officers soon found a handgun under his bed, one of them wrote in a court filing. Because the man was a felon, merely having the weapon could be a serious federal crime – precisely the sort of case federal authorities long made a staple in their efforts to combat violent crime in one of the United States’ most dangerous cities.
But federal authorities did not charge him. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore declined to comment on the case.
The federal government has retreated from gun enforcement in Baltimore and elsewhere this year as more of its investigators turn their attention to President Donald Trump’s new priority for law enforcement: hunting immigrants in the U.S. illegally to deport, Reuters found after reviewing millions of court records and interviewing five former federal officials who participated in the effort.
Last year, federal prosecutors in Maryland charged 131 people with violating the two most commonly enforced federal gun laws. So far this year, they have brought 89 such cases, about 32% fewer, and the lowest number in at least 25 years, according to Reuters’ analysis of court dockets. The shift is part of a broader federal slowdown in the state, where the number of federal prosecutions unrelated to immigration has fallen nearly 10% in 2025, the dockets show.
The Justice Department’s retreat from gun enforcement in Baltimore is one facet of an abrupt shift in federal law enforcement this year that has sidelined some traditional crime-fighting efforts such as those targeting money-laundering, tax offenses and drugs to pursue deportations instead, Reuters found after reviewing court records nationwide.
The Trump administration ordered thousands of federal agents to focus on immigration enforcement, leaving the number of criminal prosecutions for everything from drug to tax offenses at their lowest point in decades.
“They were wasting their time,” said Darius Reeves, who was the head of the Baltimore field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency in charge of deportation efforts, until he retired in May. “You’re taking away valuable resources from critical missions like getting guns off the street.”
Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement that “assisting our partners with immigration enforcement has not deterred our ability to successfully investigate and prosecute other types of crime to keep American citizens safe.” She said Reuters was “cherry-picking” data to show otherwise.
The retreat from gun enforcement extends beyond Baltimore. Reuters found 40 of the nation’s 94 federal court districts in which gun prosecutions dropped more than 10% compared to last year, including those surrounding cities such as New Orleans and Milwaukee, whose murder rates have ranked among the nation’s highest.
“Everything has been swallowed up by immigration enforcement,” said a former Justice Department official, who, like several others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s internal workings.
DIVERSIONS AND SLOWDOWN
Reuters examined the extent of the pullback by gathering the dockets of every publicly available federal criminal case since the 1990s from an online legal research service that, like Reuters news agency, is a division of Thomson Reuters. In some cases, Reuters used artificial intelligence to help classify the charges people faced. A review of a random set of records showed its assessments to be 98% accurate.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would not say how many of its agents in Maryland have been shifted to immigration work. But nationwide, the administration has enlisted thousands of federal agents normally focused on other types of enforcement to help, Reuters reported this year after interviewing 20 current and former officials. Records obtained by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, show nearly 1,200 ATF agents spent at least some of their time devoted to immigration instead of gun enforcement this year, about half of its workforce.
“ATF, in essence, is not investigating gun crimes,” a former official who worked on the immigration deployments in another state said.
Even small diversions can have an outsized impact when it comes to gun cases because the ATF is a comparatively small piece of federal law enforcement. “If you have two or three agents who have to go out with ICE, that’s a lot,” another former official said.
The diversion came as the ATF is losing agents. Personnel records reviewed by Reuters show 219 criminal investigators left the agency between January and October, almost 40% more than departed in the previous four years. Reuters was unable to determine what the net loss of agents was during this time. ATF declined to answer a question about its staffing levels.
The ATF said in a statement that its agents “continuously show up for our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners” and that the administration has authorized it to hire more agents.
Reeves, the former ICE supervisor, said his office was inundated with a rotating assortment of investigators from other agencies who had been ordered to help with immigration enforcement. They were seldom helpful, he said, because they had little experience in the intricacies of immigration law. Many weren’t happy to be there, either.
“They would rather be doing their own work, which is important work,” Reeves said.
The pressure from Washington to increase deportation numbers was so intense that Reeves said he withdrew his own officers from an FBI-run gang task force in Maryland because he needed them elsewhere.
“Everything shifted to quotas,” he said.
ICE did not respond to questions about its operations.
Baltimore “was always a target-rich environment for ATF,” said Jeff Cohen, who supervised the agency’s legal team in the region until he retired last summer. And the agency prioritized making federal cases out of gun crimes there. Re-assigning agents is almost certain to stall out some of their cases, especially longer-term efforts that focus on gun trafficking.
The slowdown in Baltimore is a stark contrast to Trump’s anti-crime efforts 40 miles away in Washington – a city with a lower crime rate and far more police than Baltimore – where the administration has deployed hundreds of additional federal agents and thousands of soldiers to stamp out what the president described as a crisis of crime.
A FEDERAL PRIORITY
Baltimore has struggled with gun violence for decades. And although the city’s homicide rate has fallen sharply this year, it still ranks among the most dangerous big cities in the United States, according to data gathered by the FBI and the Real Time Crime Index, a privately run website that collects crime statistics from police agencies serving about a third of the United States.
Most of the job of pursuing gun criminals falls to local authorities. But the Justice Department long has made targeting armed criminals a central part of its effort to battle violent crime, often bringing federal charges against people arrested by local police. The people federal authorities charge are more likely to be locked up while the case is pending, more likely to be convicted and serve more time in prison when they are.
The decline in federal gun prosecutions in Maryland was steeper than the drop in crime this year. Nor can it fully explain the federal retreat. In nearby Washington, for example, federal authorities nearly doubled the number of gun prosecutions even as violent crime dropped by almost a third, according to police statistics and court records.
City police in Baltimore more than quadrupled the number of people they charged under Maryland’s law that prohibits felons from having guns. Last year, police records show they charged 37 people through the beginning of December; this year they made 171 arrests.
Meanwhile, court dockets show the number of people charged in federal court in Maryland with possessing guns illegally – usually because they had been convicted of a felony before – dropped by nearly 40%.
(Reporting by Brad Heath; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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