Skip to main content

Strategic Plan FYs 2026 – 2030

Strategic Plan FYs 2026 – 2030
Goal 1: Keep our Country Safe and Secure

Objective 1.4: Secure the Border, Combat Illegal Immigration, and Eliminate Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking

DOJ immigration objectives span border security, immigration enforcement, and efforts to disrupt human smuggling and human trafficking. The central challenge is that cartels, gangs, smugglers, traffickers, and document facilitators support criminals who operate across jurisdictions and mission lines, allowing them to move people, money, fraudulent documents, and contraband through sophisticated pipelines that are difficult for any single agency to dismantle. Moreover, DOJ continues to face a substantial caseload for immigration cases (approximately 3.6 million), and significant costs to house qualifying criminal aliens at the federal, state, and local levels. 

To help protect the integrity of the nation’s immigration system, DOJ will strengthen its interagency coordination to enhance border-security outcomes. This includes information sharing, operational planning, border barriers, deconfliction, and prosecution support across international, federal, state, and local partners so unlawful border-related activity, smuggling pipelines, trafficking indicators, and removable criminal-alien cases can be identified and acted on faster and more consistently. DOJ will use all legal authorities to support the Department of Homeland Security in immigration and removal initiatives, including efficiently adjudicating immigration cases, defending challenges to immigration detention facilities, pursuing denaturalization cases, obtaining favorable removal orders and detention decisions, and using all available criminal statutes to combat illegal immigration and related human trafficking crimes involving forced labor or sex trafficking. Furthermore, DOJ will disrupt cross-border smuggling and trafficking networks through intelligence-driven, multi-agency enforcement as well as prosecute offenders using the most serious, readily provable offenses available. 

Strategies to Achieve Objective 1.4

  • Strengthen interagency coordination to enhance border security outcomes 
  • Use all legal authorities to enforce federal immigration laws fairly
  • Disrupt and prosecute human smuggling, human trafficking, and related immigration crimes that impact public safety and border security 

Key Performance Indicators 

  • Adjudicate immigration cases: total case completions [initial case completion (ICC) and subsequent case completion (SCC)]
  • Percent of federal immigration-related crime defendants’ cases favorably resolved
  • Percent of federal human smuggling crime defendants’ cases favorably resolved
  • Number of human trafficking and human smuggling investigations that achieved at least one enforcement impact milestone 
  • Percent of civil denaturalization actions favorably resolved
  • Number of TECS/National Crime Information Center (NCIC) lookout records entered based on INTERPOL notices and diffusions

Agency Priority Goal: Eliminate Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking

Transnational human smuggling and human trafficking threaten public safety and national security. The Department of Justice is committed to aggressively targeting and dismantling dangerous transnational human smuggling and human trafficking enterprises and bringing their perpetrators to justice. By September 30, 2027, the Department of Justice will favorably resolve at least 90 percent of federal human trafficking crime defendants’ cases and 90 percent of human smuggling crime defendants’ cases. Furthermore, DOJ will leverage HSTF to conduct 392 human trafficking and human smuggling investigations that achieve at least one enforcement impact milestone.

Enterprise Risk Themes

Coordination and Governance Challenges • National Security • Violent Crime and Public Safety

Participating Components: ATF, BOP, CIV, CRM, DEA, ENRD, EOIR, FBI, OJP, OTJ, OVW, USAO/EOUSA, USMS