June 2025 Sees Declines in Federal Criminal Referrals by ATF Agents and DEA Agents

Published Aug 5, 2025

Following a Justice Department May 2025 directive [1] reassigning federal agents enforcing the country’s gun laws, official government records for June reveal that enforcement actions based on federal statutes for gun violations dropped by 14.2 percent.

Press accounts of this May directive reveal that “Justice Department officials have decided that about 2,000 of their federal agents – from the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service – will be enlisted to help the Department of Homeland Security find and arrest undocumented immigrants for the remainer of the year.” The Justice Department is reported to have “selected 25 cities to focus their efforts on.”

Reassigning 2,000 agents across these three agencies is a sizable number compared with the number of agents they employ. The ATF reported having just 2,572 special agents in FY 2024.[2]

Case-by-case records recording each referral received by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices show that June criminal referrals from the ATF were just 901, dropping from 1,050 in May 2025. See Figure 1.

Similarly, criminal referrals for violations of federal drug statutes by Drug Enforcement Administration agents also showed a parallel decline between May and June 2025, dropping by 10.4 percent.

The third agency covered by the directive—the U.S. Marshals Service – also saw its criminal referrals for federal prosecution decline. These fell by 12.6 percent. The role of the U.S. Marshals Service, the country’s oldest federal law enforcement agency, is to act as the enforcement arm of the federal courts. Its most frequent criminal referrals are for prisoner escapes, violations of supervised release after imprisonment, and failure to register as a sex offender after traveling interstate.

Figure 2 provides a comparison of the decline in referral numbers between May and June 2025 for these three agencies. These results are based on internal referral-by-referral documents recorded by each U.S. Attorneys’ Office and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). These data were obtained after lengthy litigation by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act.

What Lies Ahead?

Given many factors that can impact criminal enforcement activities, this one-month drop could be short-lived. However, these early results warrant close attention. Changes in the number of referrals are often a leading indicator of other changes that lie ahead.

In any event, because of the delay between when referrals are received by federal prosecutors, and when prosecution, conviction and sentencing take place, the full impact of these changes won’t be seen for some months. The ATF reports: “The typical ATF case recommended for prosecution remains open over a period of approximately 4 years.” Even after referral, the internal records for the first nine months of FY 2025 tracked by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices indicate that the median days between receipt of a referral and court disposal of a case has been 620 days for DEA referrals, 415 days for ATF referrals, and 156 days for US Marshals referrals.