U.S. Attorney Nicholas Ganjei delivers remarks to the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association

Remarks as prepared for delivery

Good morning, everyone. It is my sincere pleasure to speak to you today and I greatly appreciate of your invitation to do so.  It’s always an honor to speak with the men and women who put their lives on the line to enforce our nation’s laws and uphold our Constitution.

First, allow me a quick moment to introduce myself.  My name is Nicholas Ganjei, and I’m the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas.  I have spent almost the entirety of my career as a federal prosecutor, working alongside smart, dedicated agents like you.  I joined the Department of Justice in 2008 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a busy border office much like the ones here in the Southern District of Texas. I later transferred to Albuquerque, where I worked cases more akin to the ones we often see in Houston – organized crime, narcotics, and white-collar offenses. After that, I became the Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas and more recently served as Chief Counsel to Senator Ted Cruz and the Subcommittee on the Constitution for the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary. In that role, I was able to work closely with FLEOA to ensure law enforcement had both the financial and legislative support needed to perform its important mission.  In January of this year, I was appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District, with a mandate to ensure that the current administration’s law enforcement priorities are carried out, specifically, that we secure the southern border, dismantle the drug trade both in our district and overseas, and eradicate violent crime from our streets.

And that brings me to the two things I want to focus on today: The priorities of the Department of Justice and the important role that law enforcement agents like you have in carrying them out.      

Let us begin with a fundamental observation that is too-often overlooked, namely that the orderly and dispassionate enforcement of our laws is essential to our democracy. In the American system of government, the people elect Congress to enact laws, including criminal laws, that they believe to be in the country’s best interest. And Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution imposes a duty on the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The President does so by relying on the agencies and departments of the executive branch. As federal officers and employees, each of us has a duty to help the President carry out his constitutional mandate. Thus, at a fundamental level, when you leave home each day to enforce federal criminal laws, you’re not just going to work, you are not just earning a paycheck, you are not even just serving the public—you are putting our democracy into effect. You should be very proud of that.

Conversely, if federal criminal laws are not enforced, that undermines our democracy, because it means that the people’s will is not being carried out.  This lack of enforcement carries with it tremendous downstream societal effects, such as a loss of public confidence in our system of justice, and sends a subtle signal to other would-be lawbreakers that any crimes they choose to commit may go unpunished.

Unfortunately, in recent years we’ve experienced a failure to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. That neglect has produced a crisis that is the most important problem facing the United States today. For the Department of Justice, and for the Southern District of Texas, addressing this crisis is priority number one.

Some critics of immigration enforcement contend that the renewed focus on enforcing our immigration laws is somehow rooted in of a lack of compassion.  However, anyone familiar with the border crisis of the past few years knows that this accusation could not be further from the truth.  The unmistakable lesson of the past few years—a lesson painfully learned by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people—is that there is nothing compassionate about an open border.

First, the failure to enforce our immigration laws has led to an absolute explosion in human and sex trafficking, which is now a booming business for the Mexican cartels. As reported by the New York Times, in 2018, cartels made approximately $500 million in annual profits from human trafficking, but by 2022, this number had skyrocketed to $13 billion annually, a 26-fold increase.  And the cartels use that ill-gotten money to fuel campaigns of terror, corruption and assassination throughout the Americas.

As for the men and women who are smuggled, the cartels force them to pay thousands of dollars per person to cross into the United States. According to the House Committee on Homeland Security, those who cannot pay the full cost are often required to work off their “debt” to the cartels by smuggling illegal drugs across the border, by committing other crimes to help the cartels, or being subject to forced labor under horrific conditions once in the U.S.  And those are the lucky ones.  By some estimates, 80% of women and young girls are sexually assaulted while making their way to the United States. And once they arrive, things don’t get better. Many women are forced into prostitution, where they are subjected to unspeakable violence and abuse.  As one victim of the cartels told the New York Times, “You have to pay with your body.” I fail to see what is “compassionate” about this.

The cartels often transport these people in ways that endanger their lives and the lives of innocent U.S. citizens. Most of you will recall the 53 people who died near San Antonio in June 2022, gasping for breath while locked inside a tractor-trailer in the heat of the Texas summer, where they’d been abandoned by traffickers.  Others are abandoned while traversing the often-harsh south Texas landscape, particularly the old, infirm, or pregnant, who are unable to keep up with their cartel brush guide.  It was an unfortunately common sight for ranchers and landowners to come across the corpses of those the cartels left to die, with 856 such deaths in 2022 alone.

The traffickers also make our roads dangerous because they often engage in high-speed flight from law enforcement. In one such example, in November 2023, smugglers transporting several illegal aliens from Honduras fled from Zavala County deputies at high speeds, passed an 18-wheeler in a no-passing zone, and crashed head-on into a vehicle driven by two law-abiding American citizens, Jose and Isabel Lerma of Dalton, Georgia. The Lermas were both killed instantly, just one month before their 49th wedding anniversary.  All of those people being smuggled, young and old, were also killed. Again, I fail to see what is compassionate about any of this.

With so many people flooding across the border during the past few years, Border Patrol Agents were overwhelmed, and most of their time was occupied transporting and processing aliens. As a result, much of our border was only lightly patrolled, which provided an easy path for drug traffickers to smuggle their deadly wares, particularly fentanyl, into the United States. In 2024, the BBC reported that 98% of the fentanyl in the United States is smuggled from Mexico. That drug alone took over 70,000 American lives in 2022 and again in 2023. Think about that—each year, fentanyl was killing more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War. And that grim statistic includes only deaths, it does not account for the fuller picture of families ripped apart or the human potential wasted by the scourge of fentanyl.  I fail to see what is compassionate about allowing drugs to poison our communities and strike down American youth in their prime.

The failure to enforce the law has also allowed cartel and gang violence to take root in American cities. By now we’ve all heard of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, who prey on our poorest neighborhoods and enforce their will with savage violence.  The failure to enforce the law has allowed millions to enter our country either without vetting or with insufficient vetting. In June 2024, NBC News reported that over 400 aliens had been brought into the United States via one human smuggling network affiliated with the terrorist group ISIS, and that the whereabouts of 50 of these people were unknown. And those are just some of the ones we know about. It is estimated that over two million “gotaways” have entered our country from 2021 to 2024.  For those here that don’t know, gotaways are people that Border Patrol or CBP know are crossing but are unable to intercept, most likely because agents are busy processing and transporting aliens that self-surrender.  Imagine that for a moment.  At a time where the world knew that walking across the U.S. border would gain one free public benefits and free transport to anywhere in the United States, over two million people still chose to evade law enforcement and disappear into the country. I would submit to you that those who chose that path had a reason to evade federal authorities – be it a serious criminal record, the fact that they were actively smuggling contraband, or that they wished to enter anonymously in order to commit an act of terror at some later time. I fail to see how allowing unvetted persons into our country by the millions is compassionate.

Fortunately, 2025 has delivered a monumental shift in the priorities of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.  We here in the Southern District of Texas, along with our law enforcement partners, are working hard to safeguard our democracy by unapologetically enforcing the law. And we are already seeing dramatic results. Customs and Border Protection recorded 6,072 illegal crossings across the entire southern border during the month of June 2025. That’s an astonishing decrease when you consider that during the previous four years we routinely had over 6,000 illegal crossings per day.  Some months even saw 250,000 total border encounters.  We have managed to make a 180-degree turn from where we used to be, and it’s a great win for the American people; a win that you and fellow agents delivered.

We were told, time and time again over the past several decades, that gaining control over our own border was impossible, and, even more, that you were a fool if you entertained the thought that it could ever be done.  Even the term some used to describe those that enter our country illegally— “migrant”—is meant to connote a certain inevitability to mass illegal immigration, that it was as natural a phenomenon as the tides, or as predictable as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano.  It was all designed to make the American people give up, to resign themselves to the fact that millions of people would enter their country every year, and to believe that they had no say over the matter.  But the American people didn’t give up, and neither did you.  Thanks to your efforts, the border is now secure.  Border encounters are down over 95 percent versus where they were just a little over a year ago.  We know who is entering our country, and we now have the bandwidth to interdict deadly drugs and other contraband from ever reaching our nation's interior. And all this was done with no additional resources, and without passing any additional laws.  All it took to secure our border was the will to do it.

But we’re not stopping there. The State Department has officially designated the worst cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, which gives us additional tools with which to pursue them and their enablers. We are vigorously pursuing human traffickers and those that sexually exploit children. And as Attorney General Pam Bondi announced recently, the new Homeland Security Task Force “will work in every State to end the existence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations and dismantle cross-border and trafficking networks, particularly those involving children.”

You want to know what is compassionate? Enforcing the law, securing our border, and protecting the most vulnerable. As Vice President J.D. Vance said recently, “[T]he fundamental goal of our immigration policy, of our border policy … is we want your children and grandchildren to be able to raise a family in security and comfort in the country that we all love.” I couldn’t agree more.

I now want to talk about the important role you play in securing the border and fighting violent crime. In recent years, some in our society have argued that we should not be fully enforcing our criminal laws, or perhaps even that we do not need police officers or agents at all. Critics of law enforcement have argued that jailing criminals is unjust and oppressive, that police are agents of tyranny in poor communities, and that everything would be better if we just tried to understand criminals and provide them with more social services. We have seen district attorneys in major cities in this country decline to prosecute certain offenses or to seek penalties provided by law based on their personal disagreement with criminal statutes. Others refuse to prosecute quality-of-life crimes or to seek sentencing enhancements for the use of a firearm or for three-strikes offenders. The unfortunate result of such policies is increased victimization of our nation’s most economically disadvantaged communities.  And more recently, we’ve seen assaults on and attempts to kill ICE officers and other federal agents who are trying to enforce federal laws duly enacted by Congress.

Well, there’s nothing “compassionate” about deliberately deciding not to enforce our criminal laws or demonizing law enforcement. As law enforcement officers, you chose this difficult career path because you believe that ordinary, law-abiding people should be able to go about their lives, work at their jobs, and raise their families without having their cars stolen, their houses broken into, their kids poisoned by drugs, and without being ripped off, robbed, assaulted, or murdered. When you put on that badge, you dedicated yourselves to them. To my mind, law enforcement officers are some of the most compassionate people in our society.

I can tell you that there’s no one we’d rather have at our side in this fight than our partners in law enforcement. We are honored to be working with agents like you in carrying out this critical mission. And I want you to know that at DOJ, we understand the sacrifices you make. You face dangers to life and limb every day because you run towards danger, not away from it. You work long, stressful, and unpredictable hours that take you from your families. You see up close the ugly, horrific, and traumatic things that criminals do day in and day out. And that has consequences: According to the FBI, officers and agents are two to four times more likely to suffer from PTSD compared with the general population. Every move you make and don’t make is nitpicked and second-guessed by people who weren’t there and have no idea what it’s like to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.  When I began my career as a federal prosecutor, my U.S. Attorney imparted a lesson that I have carried with me throughout my career, and it’s a lesson I try to instill in my own prosecutors: “Make no mistake about who has the tougher job. When we have a bad day, whether we lose a case or get yelled at by a judge, we come home to complain to our families about it.  When our law enforcement partners have a bad day, they don’t come home at all.”

We appreciate your sacrifice. We are proud to work with you. Thank you for coming here today and I look forward to working with all of you as we build safer, more secure America.