ICE HSI Special Agents featured in National Geographic documentary series

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agents from HSI Panama will be featured in part 6 “Crossroads” of the documentary series Chain of Command airing tonight on the National Geographic Channel.

“Chain of Command” is a National Geographic eight-part series narrated by Chris Evans (“Captain America,” “The Avengers”), that offers unprecedented access to the U.S. military’s mission to combat violent extremism in hot spots like Iraq, Afghanistan, and West Africa as well as Latin America. The series also features HSI’s “Operation Citadel,” and its partnership with the Department of Defense’s (DoD), United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to curb human smuggling and other transnational criminal activities in Central and South America.

This week’s episode: “Crossroads” highlights HSI’s efforts to gather information about third country nationals and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and their activities before they reach the United States.

Operation Citadel is a multinational partner nation capacity building and collaboration operation that focuses on identifying, disrupting, and dismantling TCOs and other support networks involved in human smuggling throughout South and Central America, and Mexico. The scope of the operation includes cross-border enforcement actions with partner nations, document and media collection at ports of entries and along illicit smuggling routes, sensitive site evidence collection, biometric collection of third country nationals encountered, certified undercover and source operations.  ICE HSI is the U.S. government’s lead agency in combatting human smuggling.

Human smuggling organizations will sometimes fly aliens from outside of the Western Hemisphere to airports in South America in order to smuggle these individuals to northern South America and Central America before crossing into Mexico via a mixture of air, land, and maritime routes. These smugglers are often part of the same networks that move migrants from Central America and Mexico north to the U.S.

HSI has a significant amount of resources assigned to combatting this ever-evolving crime. Our primary concern is closing the illicit pathways that may pose a threat to our national security. We use investigative, prosecutorial and intelligence resources to target and aggressively pursue, disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.