President Donald Trump and senior officials celebrated the streamlined coordination and latest success of the Homeland Security Task Forces during a roundtable meeting on Oct. 23.
The president was joined by deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The officials each took a turn expressing gratitude for the operational efficiency of the task forces and announced numbers.
“In the last month, think about this, more than 3,200 violent gangs and drug dealers have been taken off the streets,” Bondi said.
“Ninety-one tons of drugs have been seized as a result of this task force.
“We tried to put this in perspective for you: This would be filling four 18-wheelers. Four. All the drugs just in the last month that have been taken off the street: 58,000 kilos of cocaine ... 2300 kilos of fentanyl powder and 2.1 million fentanyl pills—off the streets.”
Noem noted that the amount of fentanyl crossing the border has been cut down by 50 percent.
Gabbard thanked the president for creating the ability to have “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the Intelligence Community and law enforcement.”
She shared examples of major busts that were made possible because of the ability to share information with local law enforcement, including the arrest of a Sinaloa cartel boss in Juárez, Mexico, along with three of his money launderers, and the arrest of a cartel-associated baby trafficker known as “La Diabla.”
“Her whole money-making operation was centered around luring pregnant women, performing illegal C-sections, harvesting organs, and selling newborn babies,” Gabbard said.
Created by executive order on the president’s first day back in office, the Homeland Security Task Forces were created to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.”
The Oct. 23 roundtable comes after the White House announced that U.S. forces struck yet another alleged drug boat off the coast of South America. Nine such strikes have been announced since Sept. 2, with seven of them occurring in the Caribbean Sea in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.
It also follows an announcement made by Noem on Oct. 20 that more than 480,000 criminal illegal immigrants have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Trump took office in January. She said 70 percent of those criminal illegal immigrants had been convicted or had pending charges.
Noem announced on Oct. 7 that Fiscal Year 2025 saw the fewest border arrests since 1970. Accounting for 237,565 arrests, it marked an 87 percent drop from the average of the past four fiscal years.
“We will continue to fulfill @POTUSTrump’s promise to Make America Safe Again, secure our borders, and protect our people,” she said on X on Oct. 20.
Trump announced that as of September, the Homeland Security Task Forces became operational in all 50 states, and senior officials involved with them made it clear that they were not going to stop the momentum.
“We’re destroying the infrastructure, and we are no longer on defense. All of these great men and women are on offense,” Bondi said of the task force’s work against the cartels.
“This is not a pilot program; this is permanent.”
Jacob Burg contributed to this report.
