Homeland Security Investigations

Homeland Security Investigations is the investigative directorate of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a component of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE describes it as "the principal investigative component of DHS," responsible for "investigating, disrupting, and dismantling transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and terrorist networks that threaten or seek to exploit the customs and immigration laws of the United States."¹

Formation

According to ICE, the directorate's lineage runs to 1789, when Congress established the United States Customs Service, and its investigative elements descend from "the investigative functions of the former United States Customs Service and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service," which were merged into ICE when it began operations on March 1, 2003, under the Homeland Security Act of 2002. ICE states that in June 2010 it "underwent a structural realignment," set out in a memorandum of June 9, 2010, from John Morton, then the Assistant Secretary in charge of ICE, which combined its Offices of Investigations, Intelligence and International Affairs into a directorate "known as Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI." The reorganization was internal and not made by statute.¹

ICE gives the directorate's size as "more than 8,700 employees, including special agents, criminal analysts, mission support personnel and contract staff," assigned to more than 237 offices in the United States and more than 93 abroad.¹ In testimony in September 2024, HSI's Katrina W. Berger gave its fiscal 2023 output as "approximately 29,500 criminal investigations producing more than 33,000 criminal arrests, 16,500 indictments, and 11,250 convictions."²

CVLT prosecution

HSI Los Angeles, HSI Cherry Hill in New Jersey and HSI Honolulu conducted the federal investigation of CVLT, an online network charged with operating a child exploitation enterprise, with the Los Angeles Police Department, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office, the Henry County Sheriff's Office in Virginia, the Iowa State University Police Department and the French Police Nationale.³ A federal grand jury in the Central District of California returned the indictment in United States v. Rane et al. on January 17, 2025. When it was unsealed in early February 2025, HSI Cherry Hill arrested Collin Walker in New Jersey, and HSI Honolulu arrested Clint Borge in Pahoa; a federal magistrate in Los Angeles denied Borge bail on February 6, 2025.³⁴ HSI had identified three of the four core leaders before Borge's identity was established through the inquiry of Iowa State University police officer Kami Feld.⁵

Other investigations and data systems

In March 2017 HSI, the FBI's Philadelphia Division and IRS Criminal Investigation were the investigating agencies in the bribery and extortion indictment of Philadelphia District Attorney Rufus Seth Williams, brought by the United States Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey.⁶

ICE's FALCON analytical platform, built by Palantir Technologies and in use from 2013, integrates data from federal and state sources, including HSI and state motor vehicle records. In 2014 ICE awarded Palantir the Investigative Case Management contract, worth more than 41 million dollars, which the Electronic Privacy Information Center documented through FOIA litigation.⁷