By Sarah N. Lynch, Brad Heath and Jana Winter
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The FBI has asked local police to submit the names of people tied to drug cartels and gangs to the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list created after 9/11, which could land more Americans on the list, according to law enforcement documents seen by Reuters.
The bureau told law enforcement agencies in a May 9 email to share the names of people they believe are linked to eight criminal groups President Donald Trump has labeled foreign terrorist organizations. It also asked agencies to share information about family members and associates of the groups’ members.
The existence of the email, which was obtained by the national security-focused transparency nonprofit Property of the People through a public records request and shared with Reuters, has not been previously reported. The email was sent to law enforcement agencies and groups including the National Sheriff’s Association, which confirmed receiving it from the FBI.
The FBI declined to answer detailed questions about the email, instead referring to an earlier statement that said “watchlisting is an effective tripwire keeping those who would engage in violent criminal acts, illicit drug trade, and human smuggling/trafficking out of the country.”
The watch list contained some 1.1 million names, including about 6,000 U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents, as of August 2024, according to a January report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which is the most recent federal data available.
The change means that local police officers are likely to see more terrorism alerts when they conduct traffic stops or run background checks using the National Crime Information Center database, the FBI said in the email.
The Trump administration in February declared gangs including MS-13, Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa drug cartel foreign terrorist organizations, saying they pose a risk to national security and economic interests.
The document, sent by a former FBI assistant director, said that “agencies that possess information about members of these organizations, including their family members and associates, are required to share” it with the National Counterterrorism Center. The FBI-led Threat Screening Center would then lead an effort to determine which names should be added.
The bureau also told local police that it had recently added 300,000 immigration records to the National Crime Information Center database, including people who are facing administrative warrants for removal from the United States.
A state law enforcement office that helps facilitate intelligence sharing between federal, state and local officials issued a bulletin in late July providing instructions about how to submit names for potential inclusion on the watch list, according to a copy seen by Reuters.
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Civil liberties advocates say the U.S. government sometimes relies on questionable evidence to decide who to include.
“The U.S. watch-listing system is already a notoriously error-prone, bloated, due process nightmare and this instruction raises major red flags,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the government will use every legal avenue available “to prevent terrorists from killing Americans.”
Designating cartel and gang members as terrorists has the potential to drastically expand the number of people on the watch list.
“In the cartel context, when you are talking about people inside the U.S., the watch list’s reach becomes even broader because of the way drug trafficking networks play out,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former Department of Homeland Security attorney who is now with the Brennan Center for Justice.
He said it remains unclear whether low-level gang affiliates who sell or transport drugs would be labeled terrorists, even if they have no idea their work is connected to one of the designated cartels.
Civil rights groups have voiced concerns about the secretive nature of the list, which can subject people to surveillance on airplanes, travel restrictions and secondary screenings at airports and other ports of entry into the United States. They have also complained that the government has sometimes flagged people as members of gangs based on evidence such as their tattoos and clothing.
A federal judge ruled in 2019 that the list infringed on the constitutional rights to due process of certain U.S. citizens.
“If your name pops up in a law enforcement hit, that has all kinds of cascading consequences,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director for the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.
Authorities must spell out reasonable suspicion that a person is associated with one of the designated terrorist groups before being added to the watch list, according to public government standards. Their friends and associates would not be added automatically unless the government also suspects them of involvement, though there are exceptions to that standard, a former official familiar with the process said.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Board released a report in January with recommendations on how to improve the list’s accuracy and reliability. Several days later, the Trump administration fired three of its four board members.
“As Trump dismantles the rule of law and targets even mild dissent as security threats, ballooning terrorist watch lists are another glaring indicator of our descent toward authoritarian rule,” Property of the People’s Executive Director Ryan Shapiro said.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, Brad Heath and Jana Winter; Editing by Scott Malone and Mark Porter)
