Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable

Issue a directive refocusing HSI on immigration-related crime

Attempted

153 5. Department of Homeland Security

“Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) priorities. Issue Department Management Directive (and ICE companion Directive) to refocus HSI on immigration offenses and criminal offenses typically associated with immigration (for example, human trafficking). All criminal investigative work without a clear nexus to the border or otherwise to Title 8 should be turned over to the appropriate federal agency.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    HSI's own statement of its priorities, updated 2026-03-11, still names six, and not one of them is immigration: "Protecting National Security", "Preventing Crimes of Exploitation", "Ensuring Public Safety" (narcotics smuggling and violent gangs), "Upholding the Law in Global Trade" (intellectual property crime, trade fraud, export violations), "Investigating Cybercrime" and "Combating Financial Crime". Its mission is stated as protecting "the homeland from transnational crime and threats". Fourteen months after EO 14159 ordered that HSI's primary mission be the enforcement of the INA's illegal-entry and unlawful-presence provisions, the division has not restated its priorities to match, and the Quote's second sentence — that criminal investigative work without a border or Title 8 nexus be turned over to other agencies — is contradicted on the face of the page, which claims intellectual property, trade fraud, cyber and financial crime as HSI's own. An agency's own priorities page is Evidence of a state, not of an event (playbook §5): what it supports is that on the day we looked, the refocus had not been made.

  2. Attempted

    EO 14159 section 4 orders the Secretary to "ensure that the primary mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations division is the enforcement of the provisions of the INA and other Federal laws related to the illegal entry and unlawful presence of aliens" - the refocusing the Quote asks for, ordered by the President rather than by the Department Management Directive and ICE companion directive the Quote names. No directive has been published, and HSI has not handed its non-immigration criminal work to other agencies: DHS's own press index shows HSI in 2026 announcing sentencings in a $100 million Ponzi scheme, child-exploitation cases and financial-fraud prosecutions with no border or Title 8 nexus.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Attempted, not partial: the order was signed, but the Quote’s second sentence - “All criminal investigative work without a clear nexus to the border or otherwise to Title 8 should be turned over to the appropriate federal agency” - has demonstrably not happened, and the management directives the Quote names have not been published.

One negative search covered this ask with the others on pages 151–158 of Chapter 5. DHS’s press index returns no directive on HSI priorities.

Reviewed 2026-09-06; both open questions are answered. An earlier version of this log said HSI’s priorities page could not be found and that ICE publishes no directive index. Both were wrong about where to look.

  • HSI’s priorities are at ice.gov/hsi/priorities. That page is the second event above, and it is the strongest negative available: HSI itself, in March 2026, still lists cybercrime, financial crime and global trade among its six priorities.
  • ICE does publish a directive index, in its FOIA reading room (ice.gov/foia/library): it runs to 179 pages and filters by category, year and keyword, and its search answers a nonsense query with an explicit no-match, so an empty result is a real negative. The Policies, Procedures and Manuals category for 2025 lists 25 released documents including six HSI instruments, and for 2026 lists seven. None is a directive on HSI priorities. The nearest candidate, “2/14/2025 HSI Executive Associate Director Memo”, was read — it is a scanned 13-page memorandum from the Executive Associate Director to Assistant Directors, Deputy Assistant Directors and Special Agents in Charge whose subject line and entire summary are withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(7)(E), so it cannot be identified as this directive or excluded as another. Its only readable content is a compliance banner citing EO 14168, EO 14151 and two ICE terminology memoranda. A redacted subject line is not evidence of what a memorandum did.

The Department Management Directive the Quote names is not in DHS’s directives system either; both of DHS’s directives pages (dhs.gov/directives and dhs.gov/publication/dhs-directives-system) return “not found”.

Action
issue
Object
HSI priorities Management Directive
ID
382