Detectives in Baltimore watched on security video last summer as an argument inside a convenience store spilled into the parking lot and gunfire erupted at a speeding sedan. They quickly recognized one of the shooters: he himself had been wounded two days earlier.
Officers soon found a gun under his bed, one of them wrote in a court document. Because the man was a convicted felon, simply possessing the gun could constitute a serious federal crime, precisely the type of case that has long been a pillar of federal efforts to combat violent crime in one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.
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 backed off from enforcing gun laws in Baltimore and elsewhere this year as more investigators turn their attention to President Donald Trump’s new priority for law enforcement: locating illegal immigrants in the United States for deportation, 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 filed 89 such cases, about 32% fewer and the lowest number in at least 25 years, according to Reuters analysis of court records. The change is part of a broader federal slowdown in the state, where the number of non-immigration-related federal prosecutions has fallen nearly 10% in 2025, records show.
The Justice Department’s retreat from gun law enforcement in Baltimore is one facet of an abrupt shift in federal action this year, which has shifted away from some traditional anti-crime efforts — such as those targeting money laundering, tax crimes and drugs — to focus on deportations, Reuters found after reviewing court records across the country.
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The Trump administration ordered thousands of federal agents to focus on immigration enforcement, leaving the number of criminal prosecutions — from drug offenses to prosecutors — at its lowest level in decades.
“They were wasting their time,” said Darius Reeves, who was head of the Baltimore field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency in charge of deportations, until he retired in May. “Valuable resources are being taken away from critical missions like getting guns off the streets.”
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement that “helping our partners with immigration enforcement has not deterred our ability to successfully investigate and prosecute other types of crimes to keep American citizens safe.” He added that Reuters was “selecting data in a biased manner” to prove otherwise.
The rollback in gun law enforcement extends beyond Baltimore. Reuters found 40 of the country’s 94 federal judicial districts in which gun prosecutions fell more than 10% compared to last year, including those surrounding cities like New Orleans and Milwaukee, whose homicide rates have been among the highest in the country.
“Everything has been absorbed by immigration enforcement,” said one former Justice Department official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the department’s internal workings.
Detours and deceleration
Reuters examined the extent of the retreat by compiling the records of all publicly available federal criminal cases since the 1990s, from an online legal research service that, like the 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 that their assessments were 98% correct.
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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) would not say how many of its agents in Maryland have been reassigned to immigration duties. But nationally, the administration has mobilized thousands of federal agents who normally focus on other types of law enforcement to help with immigration, Reuters reported this year after interviewing 20 current and former officials. Records obtained by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, show that nearly 1,200 ATF agents spent at least some of their time this year on immigration rather than gun law enforcement, about half of its workforce.
“ATF, at its core, is not investigating gun crimes,” said a former official who worked on immigration deployments in another state.
Even small deviations can have a disproportionate impact on gun cases because the ATF is a relatively small part of federal forces. “If you have two or three agents that have to go out with ICE, that’s a lot,” another former official said.
The diversion came at the same time the ATF is losing agents. Personnel records reviewed by Reuters show that 219 criminal investigators left the agency between January and October, nearly 40% more than those who left in the previous four years. Reuters could not determine what the net loss of agents was during that period. The ATF declined to answer a question about its staffing levels.
The ATF said in a statement that its agents “continually appear 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 group of investigators from other agencies who had been ordered to help with immigration enforcement. They were rarely helpful, he said, because they had little experience in the complexities of immigration law. Many were not happy to be there either.
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“They would rather be doing their own work, which is important work,” Reeves said.
Pressure from Washington to increase deportation numbers was so intense that Reeves said he withdrew his own agents from an FBI-led 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 the ATF,” said Jeff Cohen, who oversaw the agency’s legal team in the region until he retired last summer. And the agency prioritized turning gun crimes there into federal cases. Reassigning agents almost certainly cripples some of their cases, especially longer-term efforts that focus on gun trafficking.
The slowdown in Baltimore stands in stark contrast to Trump’s anticrime efforts 40 miles away in Washington — a city with a lower crime rate and many more police officers than Baltimore — where the administration has deployed hundreds of additional federal agents and thousands of troops to quell what the president described as a crime crisis.
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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 compiled by the FBI and the Real Time Crime Index, a private website that compiles crime statistics from law enforcement agencies serving about a third of the country.
Most of the work of pursuing armed criminals falls to local authorities. But the Justice Department has long made targeting armed criminals a central part of its fight against violent crime, often filing federal charges against people arrested by local police. People charged by federal authorities are more likely to be detained while their case is pending, to be convicted, and to serve longer prison terms.
The drop in federal gun crime prosecutions in Maryland was steeper than the decline in crime this year. Nor can the federal withdrawal be completely explained by it. In nearby Washington, for example, federal authorities nearly doubled the number of gun prosecutions even as violent crime fell by nearly a third, according to police statistics and court records.
Baltimore police more than quadrupled the number of people charged under Maryland’s law that prohibits convicted felons from possessing guns. Last year, police records show they charged 37 people through early December; This year they made 171 arrests.
Meanwhile, court records show that the number of people charged in federal courts in Maryland with illegal gun possession — usually because they had previously been convicted of a felony — fell nearly 40%.
With information from Reuters.
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