Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News
I’m Brian Driscoll, and it’s my honor to be representing the men and women of the FBI as acting director.
I want to take a few minutes to share with you some of the important work those men and women have been doing across the country and around the world—every day—to keep the American people safe.
I’ll start with our Top Ten list.
The Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list has been helping the FBI apprehend dangerous criminals for 75 years. In that time, we’ve located or arrested nearly 500 fugitives on the list, including two in just the past week:
Donald Eugene Fields II, who was arrested in Florida on charges of child sex trafficking and child rape; and Arnoldo Jiminez, who was taken into custody in Mexico on murder charges.
I’m grateful to both of these case teams for their work and to our partners for their support in bringing these violent criminals to justice.
You’ve heard the FBI always gets its man, but our work is never done.
Today, we’re announcing the addition of Fausto Isidro Meza-Flores to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Known as El Chapo Isidro, he’s accused of spending the last 20 years flooding the U.S. with fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and other deadly drugs, first as an independent drug trafficker and later as the head of the Meza-Flores cartel.
In addition to the scourge of illicit drugs Meza-Flores and his organization have unleashed into the United States from across our southern border, they’re also accused of heinous crimes ranging from kidnapping and extortion to torture and murder.
The U.S. government is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest and conviction, and we encourage anyone with information about his whereabouts to contact the FBI and help us add Meza-Flores to the list of dangerous fugitives we’ve brought to justice together.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the exceptional work the FBI’s been doing lately.
Every day, our men and women are working hard to be there for our partners and keep our communities safe.
That includes all the work we’ve been doing to support the Department of Homeland Security in its immigration enforcement efforts. We’ve got special agents, intelligence analysts, and more supporting DHS teams across the country, from New York and Chicago to El Paso, Newark, and Denver. So far, this work has led to the arrest of dangerous criminals and terrorists all across the country, and we’ve taken illegal firearms off the streets and out of our communities.
At the same time, our people are hard at work with our local, state, and federal partners in the run-up to this Sunday’s Super Bowl. In addition to our team in New Orleans, we’ve deployed scores of FBI employees to surge in support of this effort—from bomb techs to SWAT operators to intelligence analysts—and each one of them is focused on keeping the event safe for everyone.
Our teams have also been working around the clock to respond to the tragic plane crashes in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in support of recovery efforts.
All of that work is critically important to our partners and to the American people, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the work the men and women of the FBI are doing every single day, across the country and around the world, to keep people safe.
We will never take our eyes off of our mission: protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.
Because at the Bureau, we’re focused on the work, the people we do the work with—our partners—and the people we do the work for—the American people.
Thank you.