To address the crisis President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 to dismantle TCOs and prevent international trafficking by, not only strengthening the enforcement of federal law, but also ensuring that Homeland Security agencies devote sufficient resources to identifying, interdicting and disrupting TCOs.
All these years later the Department of Homeland Security has no clue how many TCOs it has dismantled and, even worse, the agency created after 9/11 to safeguard the country inflates the figures markedly.
During a recent five-year period Homeland Security Investigations, DHS's principal investigative arm responsible for disrupting terrorist and transnational threats, failed to accurately measure and publicly report its progress dismantling TCOs, according to a report issued this month by the DHS Inspector General.
The watchdog reviewed a sample of 422 Significant Case Reports and determined that 253 did not describe an entity that aligned with HSI's definition of a TCO. "From FY 2017 through FY 2022, HSI did not accurately publicly report its progress against its established performance measure of disrupting or dismantling TCOs," investigators write in the report.
HSI created the SCR process over a decade ago to identify its most important cases and measure its success in disrupting criminal organizations such as TCOs as well as to justify more congressional funding.
The DHS IG found that the embellished stats occurred because the agency relied on data in the case reports which conveniently failed to distinguish between TCO-related and non-TCO-related probes.
The DHS watchdog reveals that "To be considered significant, the investigation must involve a high-threat TCO engaged in criminal activity related to child exploitation; travel or finance; illicit trade; counterterrorism; worksite enforcement; gangs; or national security."
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