Several key arrests have been made by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) divisions across the country in recent weeks, including fraudsters and drug traffickers, FBI Director Kash Patel said in a weekly internal update.
Walking through some of the key victories, Patel highlighted a few arrests made and outcomes in court that he believes bode well for the American people.
FBI Houston, for example, arrested 10 individuals as part of Operation Spring Cleaning, all on allegations of “trafficking fentanyl, cocaine, counterfeit pharmaceutical drugs, and firearms near Houston’s Clinton Park neighborhood.”
“On Tuesday, FBI Charlotte arrested a former Army employee for betraying her oath and leaking classified national security information to a media outlet. Now, she’ll face justice for putting our nation, our warfighters, and our allies at risk,” Patel explained, also highlighting the work of FBI Detroit, whose work resulted in one individual pleading guilty for conspiring to defraud Medicare and Medicaid of nearly $2 million dollars.
“The FBI will not rest until this type of fraud and corruption are eliminated across the country,” he said, continuing down his list.
“Out of Cincinnati, a man pled guilty to sexually abusing minor children online in a historic, first of its kind takedown under the new 2025 ‘Take It Down Act’ – a priority for this FBI and this administration to protect victims from nonconsensual explicit content and AI-generated forgeries online,” Patel said, also noting that the the Cyber Division, along with teams in Boston and Philadelphia “carried out Operation Masquerade, which successfully disrupted a hijacking network run by Russian military intelligence.”
Patel also pointed to the victories on the homeland security front, highlighting the past successes of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTF).
“Thanks to our New York JTTF, a Pakistani man just pled guilty for planning an ISIS-inspired mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the anniversary of the October 7th attack in Israel,” he said, explaining that the FBI stopped this man before he even could enter the country.
Thanks to the efforts of the FBI’s Denver JTTF, he continued, a Colorado man was just sentenced to “three years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release for attempting to join ISIS abroad and give them money.”
Further, Patel said the FBI’s Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell helped secure the release of American journalist Shelly Kittleson, who was kidnapped in Iraq on March 31st.
Patel has continued to champion many of the agency’s wins, highlighting its pursuit of fraud and crackdown on crime. During a recent interview with Breitbart News Saturday, Patel credited much of the agency’s ability to do this to President Donald Trump’s “back the blue” attitude.
“First and foremost, you need a commander in chief who’s going to back the blue — and that’s what we have with President Trump. He delivered us the resources and gave us a mandate to get rid of the bureaucratic handcuffs and let good cops be cops,” Patel told host Matthew Boyle.
Patel continued, “And that’s what we did. I took one thousand agents that were stationed in the National Capital Region last year, that means the D.C. area, and I moved them out to the field permanently. That means every single state in the country got a plus up in federal law enforcement personnel from the FBI to go out there and crush violent crime and defend the homeland.”
Because of that move, the U.S. saw a 112-percent increase in violent crime arrests by the FBI alone year-over-year, Patel added.
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