Badlands Media - Badlands Media Special Coverage: 10/15/26 - DOJ Operation Show Me Justice Results in St. Louis

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

The Department of Justice holds a press conference in St. Louis to announce the results of Operation Show Me Justice, an ATF-led surge against violent crime that ends today after two months. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter reports 435 arrests, including 412 on outstanding warrants, along with 80 kilos of drugs, 166 illegal firearms, six machine gun conversion devices and over $1 million in currency seized. He credits the ATF, Marshals Service, DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, and invites mayors and police chiefs across the country to partner with the department. Senator Eric Schmitt says more than 500 of the region's most violent criminals are now off the streets. The ATF director announces a new Crime Gun Intelligence Center for St. Louis starting in January 2027, and the Marshals Service director and Police Commissioner Robert Tracy describe how the federal, state and local partnership worked with the community. In the questions, the officials explain the charges, compare this surge to the D.C. and Memphis task forces, and note homicides down about 50 percent from last year. Schmitt also talks about defense jobs, a new airport and ICE in Missouri. The full press conference.

The badlands, what are the badlands? Explain those badlands. That's a hell of a name. All right. Morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I'm Trent McCutter. I'm the acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

I would thank you all for being here this morning. I want to thank everyone here who's standing with me. We've got Senator Schmidt. We've got Director Sakata of the ATF. We've got Director Soralta of the U.S. Marshal Service. We got Tom Albus, our U.S. attorney and we got Robert Tracy our police commissioner here in St. Louis. So I'm here in the show me state to talk about an operation that we refer to as show me justice, which is an ATF lead effort to reduce violent crime here in St. Louis. The surge operation has actually been ongoing for about two months now and it's coming to a conclusion today, a very successful conclusion, I might add, and I'll get to that in a minute. So I'll start by highlighting the people who actually did all the work. I get to take the credit for it, but it's the people here on the ground, the A.E. agents on the ground, the directors or the US attorneys,

our FBI friends, ATF, DEA, HSI, who actually do the work. Many of them, of course, are not here. They're actually out doing their jobs, and we appreciate that, keeping us safe. So eight weeks ago, agents from ATF, martial service, DEA, FBI, Homeland Security, and also, of course, single-less Metro Police Department, surged in the city with the United Purpose.

We're gonna work side by side, state, local, federal to target violent crime, guns, drugs, and all sorts of other violent behavior occurring in the city of St. Louis. Through Operation Show Me Justice, the teams have arrested 435 individuals for drug crimes, firearm crimes, other crimes. That includes 412 outstanding warrant arrest.

So most of these individuals already had outstanding warrants for arrests. Many of them have multiple. I heard of a guy who had seven, seven outstanding warrants who was just picked up. So these are people who've been wanted for a long time. A lot of them are still operating in their neighborhoods well until now, because now they've been arrested and taken off the streets.

80 kilos of drugs, 166 illegal firearms or six machine gun conversion devices, and over a million dollars in currency seized. So there are people watching right now. There may be people in this room who, because of the work that's been done over the last two months, They or you or a friend or a family member have not been robbed, have not been assaulted, have not been poisoned by legal drugs because of the work that's been done the last two months. So I want to thank all the men and women of law enforcement

who go out there and do this work every single day. They put their lives on the line to keep us safe so that we can sit here and have press conferences like this and celebrate it. And they've all worked together to make St. Louis better and safer. The mission here rest on a simple, premise, which is we don't have to accept violent crime. It's not something you have to shrug your shoulders at. This is not a fact of life in a city or anywhere else. If you have the political

willpower and we're glad that we had it here and we have cooperation, if you have that, then you can make a meaningful difference. President Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche are leading by example. We also got the D.C. Safe and Memphis Safe projects that you all have probably heard of there in other cities that have also had significant reductions in violent crime as a result of those. But again, just to be clear, the federal government cannot do this by itself and has not at all done this by ourselves. We must work with the state and locals. And when they help us and we help them, we have much better results overall. We've never been able to achieve this by ourselves. And I think they would never been able to achieve it by themselves. It comes together only from both

of us. So I want to say something to all the mayors, the city council, governors, police chiefs who are out there watching now. Violence is not inevitable. We want to partner with you. We want to work with you. We want to help you. You know how to contact us. We've seen the results here.

We've seen the results in other cities. And we're happy to keep partnering with those who wish to assist. So Operation Show Me Justice is coming to an end now. But of course, our work to be clear is not finished. We're still going to be working every day with our friends here in St. Louis. state and federal and local to ensure that we maintain these sorts of numbers and maintain the reduction in violence. So our assistant U.S. attorneys who work for Tom Albus here, all the federal agents, the state partners, are going to keep going so that we can maintain these great results.

To the agents, the officers, the prosecutors out there, again, I want to thank them sincerely from the bottom of my heart for all their work and for putting themselves on the line every day to keep us safe. I'll turn it over now to my very good friend and great ally of the, Department of Justice Senator Schmidt. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I want to thank everybody for being here. I want to echo the comments about thanking the men and women of law enforcement who are on the streets making a difference between Operation Viper and this operation, there have been over 500 of the most violent criminals in this region taken off the streets. As a native St. Louison, there is no reason why we should accept that violent crime is something

that is in the headlines every single day. It does not have to be that way, but it does take cooperation. It does take political will. It takes an administration that is focused on that. So my role in all of this is just to support the men and women who are doing the important work. When I talk to the president about St. Louis, when I talk to the Attorney General about St. Louis, when I talk to the FBI director about St. Louis, it is about making sure we have all the federal resources we need to make a difference in reduce violent crime. And that's happening.

We have the largest infusion of FBI permanent FBI agents in the country per capita now in St. Louis. These are the things that you talk about in confirmation hearings. These are the things that you work on as a priority for your state. St. Louis is my home. And I want people to feel safe. As a former attorney general, I want people to feel safe. And this cooperation from the federal, state, and local for law enforcement is something that is unique. And it's happening.

And this is not a one and done kind of press conference. We're going to continue this work. We're hoping to be some, you know, important announcements down the road, but we're going to continue to advocate for more and more help here in St. Louis. So that the grandmother that's tired of sweeping up the glass on her front porch on Sunday mornings know, knows that people are there to support her. That the mother who's at a funeral for her son doesn't, that's not going to happen. And we do not have to accept that this is a reality. We don't have to accept the fact that St. Louis is high on that list because those numbers are coming down. And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure we have all the help that we need so the men and women of law enforcement can keep doing the important jobs that they're doing,

like arresting 500 of the most violent criminals in this town and getting them off the streets. With that, I'll introduce Director Rob Takata. Morning, everyone. You'll hear a recurring theme today about partnerships and relationships. the partnerships that we share amongst our state and local partners are truly invaluable. None of this would happen with any one particular agency operating on their own. Today, the efforts of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, the ATF, the United States Marshal Service, the FBI, DEA, the Missouri State Patrol Office of the Circuit Attorney's

Office and the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, working together hand in hand or why these results came together in eight weeks. Our folks at ATF in particular, we bring some special tools with us. We use crime gun intelligence to help us identify the gang members, the shooters, and the individuals responsible for firearms trafficking, which lead to firearms getting into the hands of violent offenders. Those types of tools are unique to our agency and we work with our partners every day to make sure that the other important partner we bring into this is the community the relationship that uh commissioner tracy has developed with this community is integral to his success and we want to make sure that

when we focus our efforts on violent criminals there's no collateral damage uh committed upon the community members who are already suffering and don't need to be re-victimized inadvertently by law enforcement those efforts have been very successful and as a result at f is committing our partnership with Commissioner Tracy in January of 2027 we will make an investment to open a crime gun intelligence center in conjunction with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in that center we will focus our efforts on further developing leads to identify violent criminals using crime gun tracing, niben and DNA tracing for investigative profiling. Again, that's a significant tool that will be brought to this area permanently,

in addition to analysts and other intelligence research specialists that will be joining that team. So thank you, and I'd like to turn this over to my friend, Gaddi Saralta, the director of the U.S. Marshal Service. Thank you, Deputy Attorney General McConnor, Senator Schmidt, and Director Sakata. The United States Marshals Service is very proud to have supported operations show me justice. By removing these dangerous drugs and firearms from the St. Louis streets, we have achieved unprecedented results, not just for the partners who participated in the operation, but also for the resident students and visitors to the Gateway City. This represents not just a start, but a continuation of our efforts to secure our streets and provide safe communities by taking firearms from those who would use them to hurt others and taking dangerous drugs that poison our youth.

This is part of an overall effort at the direction of this administration that has been successful across the nation. We have combined to take dangerous narcotics several thousands of illegal firearms from criminals who should not possess them. This translates to stopping murders, robberies, rapes, assaults by removing these weapons and the subjects who would use these weapons to commit those crimes. It is through the coordinated efforts with our partners at ATF, our other federal, law enforcement partners and are local, we cannot do it without our locals. That's what allows us to make this tremendous impact in fighting crime. Why we do these operations is for the safety of our children and families that make up our communities. The successes we have realized are directly attributable to the Trump administration and

their emphasis on and commitment to reducing violent crime in making our communities safer. Teamwork and collaboration modeled from the top down by the administration has been vital to the success of this operation. Strong partnerships make stronger neighborhoods. By working alongside our partners and bringing additional resources to St. Louis,

we can build on the progress that operate Show Me Justice has shown. This operation was ultimately about the people we serve, helping families feel safe in their neighborhoods, supporting the officers working to protect them, and continuing to build safer, stronger communities across our nation. Now, I'd like to introduce one of the U.S. Marshals strongest partners in St. Louis, police chief, Robert Trace.

Every person in St. Louis deserves to feel safe on their block, in their home, and going about their daily life. That's the purpose behind this work and the commitment that brings all of us together today. The community of St. Louis has asked for operations like this and we have heard them. Senator Eric Schmidt is here today. There's the importance to have him speaking here today. And I also want to thank ATF director Rob Sakata for being here and for the resource. sources and expertise his agency brings to St. Louis. I have the pleasure of serving alongside him on the Executive Board of the National Crime

Gun Intelligence Board, where we work to strengthen collaborations and intelligence sharing that help communities confront gun violence across the United States. Here in St. Louis, that collaboration happens every day. Our officers and detectives work with ATF and our other federal-state local partners to connect investigations and this starts with the department of justice thank you for their support the u.s attorney's office the u.s marshals office d ea fbi hs i Missouri highway patrol i see captain kevin malugian back there who's always helping us locally from the state partners hider i said these things are cooperative effort and our offices are embedded in each one of these

units so we're working to work to working together each and every day so we want to identify violence and build strong cases. Operations show me justice builds on those relationships and as we know we cannot do this without the community and with us today is the president of the clergy coalition Pastor Duane Birch who's to my left. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your partnership and your support and support of doing this to make sure we're doing it right. We're respecting our community and make sure keeping our community safe and your partnership needs so much and you being here today. Thank you, you pastor. I'm grateful to the officers, agents, analysts, and prosecutors, and they're persistent

that makes this work possible. Their willingness to share information and work across agency lines that help us prevent the next shooting and protect the next potential victim. Because of this operation, we have taken more violent individuals off the streets, which helps reduce non-fatal shootings and murders in this city and in this region. Our residents are essential partners to. Empowering neighborhoods means listening to their concerns. Following through and earning their confidence to come forward, people deserve a voice in the safety of our community.

And our community has asked for things like this. And once again, we have heard them. And this is why we're doing things like this. We're going to continue to do things like this because the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has been embedded with all these agencies before this during this operation. and we're gonna continue to do this afterwards. Success means families comfortable letting their children play outside.

Business is confident about investing in this city and neighbors able to enjoy their front porches. Those everyday freedoms are what we're working to protect. We're encouraged by our progress in reducing violent crime and we're determined to sustain it. I want St. Louis to know that this partnership and our commitment to every St. Louis neighborhood continues beyond today.

Now I'd like to introduce US Attorney of the Missouri Eastern District, Tom Mappas. US Attorney. Thank you all for being here and helping us get the word out. I really, what can I add to the impressive results of Operation Show Me Justice? Just a couple of thoughts. At the beginning of this enforcement action,

you might remember it was reported. The ATF was supporting the St. Louis Police Department doing a car stop in St. Louis, and a car came up to, fully automatic with the Glock switch firearms just opened up on a marked St. Louis City police vehicle. Thank God, nobody was hurt. You know, think maybe the Glock switch has caused the key because you don't know where you're going to shoot the gun when you have a fully automatic Glock. But that's what these men and women were facing.

That's what they face every day. And so it just makes you think, why are we doing this? Why don't you do something else for a living, prosecutors and law enforcement officials? And some of the speakers touched on it. And it's just it's heartening. And you always are cautious to take credit for when the crime goes down because I don't know if I'm ready to take the blame if it goes up. There's a lot of factors out here and everybody's working together on it. But when you get those numbers down like they're down, some people have some of the speakers have touched on it.

Then it begins to change people's minds. And they can envision a city where like the chief said, you can go out for a walk after dinner or you can go down to the park. but it's got a change in people's minds that, yeah, I can do that. I can take that chance because I trust the people that are trying to keep my community's sake. So we're down and that's great. And we hope it continues to go down. And when you've got your opponent on his back foot, that's not when you play prevent.

That's when you try to run up the score. So that's what we're trying to do. We feel like we've got the shooters and the killers on their back foot. And we really want to put our foot on the accelerator and just keep driving. driving them down. But the big thing, success for me is when people in these neighborhoods really can envision saying, hey, I can live my life just like somebody living in Chesterfield. I can go to the park, I can go to the store, and I'm not going to be afraid. So that's what we're all working for. That's why we do this as opposed to something else. I'm really grateful for the ATF personnel that

came to St. Louis that dropped everything and helped us. But we're in it for the long haul with the St. Louis Police Department, all state, local federal partners, the circuit attorney's office, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Office, we're in it for the long haul. Thank you. We can take a couple questions if anyone has any. Of the 435 arrests, how many have led to charges? And can you give us kind of a gamut of what those charges are? And Mr. Albus just talked about an incident with a car, but can you give us more insight of what this operation has looked like over the last two months? We're talking rates of homes and businesses, can you talk a little bit more detail about what this is looked like?

I give a little bit of information about some of the charges and everything. So remember, most of the individuals who have been picked up already had charges on the net arrest warrants outstanding. So in a lot of these cases, it's just picking up people who are already known to the system, already been through the system and are wanted by the system. And so they've got those outstanding charges already in terms of what they're being picked up for now on top of the warrants. It's usually firearms, uh, felony assault, violent crime, illegal drugs, that sort of thing. almost all them, I mean, someone can correct me, but almost all the charges, I think,

are those sorts of crimes, like the very serious violent felony type crimes and illegal drug possession or dealing. There's also, as I said, some of the firearm charges. There are a couple that involved devices that turn, as Tom said, guns into fully automatic sort of thing. In terms of the number of folks here, my understanding is it's been about 90 federal officials

assisting with about 30 extra from Metro PD. And so that's a pretty large, team to be able to tackle these sorts of problems and work together in terms of the kind of some of the further breakdowns. I'm not sure who best would have that. Maybe Commissioner would have a little more information, maybe not. Well, most of the arrests, as you know, their ongoing investigations as far as going to people's homes and houses, wherever we have to go to catch somebody that's breaking

the law as a violent felon to keep this community safe, we're going to go there. So I don't have the exact details, how many homes or how many businesses we've been in, but I know we're going to do a thorough and to make sure we could bring them to justice. So that's pretty much the answer, but not breaking down how you're asking that, but certainly we're going to follow them to wherever they lead us. So thank you. Chief, do you talk about how important it is to have partnerships like this?

Very important. Well, it's incredible. I think you've heard all the speakers up here talk about the collaboration. Sometimes that doesn't always happen, but I can assure you in this city, it is happening. And you can see the results and how this was done. And when I did the first press conference, and I talked about this at a public meeting, I was questioned, how are we doing this?

Well, we're doing this because we're doing it together. And when you do it together, you do it with the community and the community has confidence and the local police working together with all our federal and state partners in a common goal and a plan to make sure we're protecting everyone's rights. We're not arresting everyone when we come into this amount of people.

We're arresting those with the highest propensity for violence, which everyone knows, and they also have the highest propensity of violence to commit violence, but also to be a victim of violence. So sometimes we're getting them out of a situation to find out what's going on, accept their charges and get them the help that they need if they're going to be released and put back into the community. So I think it's a win-win. This relationship shows it, and I couldn't be more proud.

It's my fourth city and being part of this thing, it's an incredible partnership, and you're seeing the results because of that. And it's great to the community. That's why you have Pastor Reverend Birch that's here, and he supports this, and he's here today because of the way we did it and respected the community to keep them safe. So thank you again, Reverend. We have a lot of press conferences about these operations this year. What makes this one different from the other federal anti-crime service in the area?

Well, I mentioned before the one in D.C., the Memphis Safe Task Force. This one is shorter duration. It's about two months. As I said, it's concluded as of today. The others tend to be a year, sometimes more than a year. The presence in those other ones, federally, is much larger for D.C. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but even for Memphis, the federal presence was much greater than it is here. This is more of a targeted team, even though I said it's 120 people.

That's a lot and it is. But compared to the others, the personnel totals are a little bit smaller. But the point here, again, is to kind of show that even with a kind of medium-sized team like that, that you can achieve unbelievable results. I've seen some of the year-over-year numbers, and it looks like homicide numbers, I think, are down 50% compared to the time, the same time last year. And so that's just from having good cooperation with our local folks, local folks here, and from the local city and kind of surging in some extra federal resources. If you think about what are ATF agents good at, what are Marshall's agents good at?

They're good at catching people who are wanted by the law. And most of the people we picked up are, in fact, wanted by the law under state law charges. I guess I think different local operations. How are we differentiating this one between the few that we have announced earlier this year, here? Is there a discernible difference? Well, Mr. McIyer touched on it, but we had Operation Viper with the FBI. We had Operation Patriot Shield with the Marshals and now we have Operation Show Me Justice. Similar in terms of examples of cooperation among state, local and federal, but Patriot Shield plays to the strengths of the Marshals, which is clearing all those warrants, Viper plays to the strengths, the investigative strengths of the FBI.

And now ATF focuses on the gun expertise of the ATF. So that'd be one thing I'd say in response. And Sanders, Schmidt, last week you were, of course, at Miami airport talking about Operation Modern Skies, talking about this today. What does it say that St. Louis is getting so much federal help in different sectors

right now to try and develop our community? Because I'm harassing everyone in Washington about Missouri. No, look, I've been pretty clear that when I came in, I had three big priorities. And some of it is reputational and some of it is actual like sort of jobs. One is to reduce violent crime in St. Louis. And we talked about,

the people, the individuals impacted by that, but also the reputation of this town. If we want to grow and we want to be a world-class city, people can't believe that it's the most violent place in the country. And so those numbers are coming down and so we're continued to advocate for federal resources. That's a priority. Making St. Louis the defense tech capital of the United States of America worked very hard to make sure we got the F-47 that's going to be built at Boeing. Two weeks ago was announced the Navy version that's going to be built here in St. Louis in that 1.1 million square foot facility. That's 7,000 jobs.

That is the investment that's going to happen in this region because of those two contracts. We've never seen anything like it, honestly, from a defense perspective. And then Lambert, St. Louis deserves a world-class airport. The airport, everybody who's from here knows, it's just it's outdated. And for us to continue to grow, we need to have a new modern airport. And so those are the three big priorities, and we're delivering on that. But I just, I will tell you just as somebody's from here and was in, you know, the attorney general, this is a cause that is near and dear to my heart because I met with so many people and thank you for being here. So many people who were just tired of having to deal with it every day or not feeling comfortable sending their kids to school or the fear that a loved one would be murdered because of the neighborhood that they lived in.

And I just don't, my philosophy is we just don't have to accept. that but what are you going to do about it and the position that I'm in now is to continue to advocate for more federal resources we have a great U.S. attorney here we have a department of justice that is focused on reducing violent crime so you try to meet the moment if there's a focus if there's a focus and their resources available I'm going to work my tail off to make sure they're coming here and that's that's the goal and I think the numbers prove it's successful and to the question earlier I hope we do these all the time I think that the community unfortunately sees on the news every night the things that are happening that are tragic.

I think for the people of this region, they need to understand there are a lot of people, a lot of people working. You'll never know their names. Hopefully you thank them when you see them, law enforcement, but are doing very dangerous work to protect this community. Just think about the question Corey asked about, who are these people.

These are people who have warrants out, who are very bad, dangerous people. It is dangerous work to go get them. But that's what they signed up for and God bless them because they're doing it because they're protecting the broader community by getting those people off the streets. Can you give me a ballpark of how many new charges we're talking about here, whether it's a combination of state and federal. And then to the ATF, can you give us any more detail about what this new investment come January is going to look like? On the first question, most of these individuals I said are being picked up on. charges that are preexisting. So most of those are state charges. Some of them are now additional

federal charges on top. As I think the commissioner said, I don't have the exact breakdown on those. But as the senator said, like these are like some of the worst of the worst guys out there. They're known to the system. They already have arrest warrants for violent crime. So they're getting picked up on similar sorts of charges now. It's kind of a short answer to your question before is that Senator Schmidt has been a relentless advocate for the people of Missouri. and he's been a great ally for the Department of Justice. And we're glad to have him. I'm glad to work with them.

And the people in Missouri have a great senator in him. I don't know if Rod has anything. Sorry, the ATF. If I may. So as far as ATF goes, the investment that we'll be making in January is, thankfully to the Trump administration, the president and his team provided ATF with additional funding to expand our agent cadre,

in addition to our intelligence research specialists and other analysts that will be hiring over the next several months and frankly over the next two years. They'll be placed in cities that need the most assistance to our state and local partners who are suffering from violent crime problems. So there'll be additional agents coming in here in the new year. There'll be additional intelligence research specialists. The specialists will be connected through our forensic crime gun intelligence laboratory, which is located in Wichita, Kansas. So all of the work that's going to be done here will basically be collecting fire cartridge casings, which Commissioner Tracy has a long history of following the methodologies required to make crime gun intelligence successful. They pick up shell casings from crime scenes

and they're just like fingerprints left at a crime scene. We can identify the people that were responsible for violent crimes, where those guns came from and develop strategies to ensure we focus our efforts on the trigger pullers. And again, not to just go into a community like we would have, 25 or 30 years ago, not knowing who to focus on. We focus on the right offenders, remove them from those communities, and reduce filing crime. That's what they will be seeing in the new year.

Chief, we've talked before about filling out the ranks at the department with the unfilled positions. How could getting the manpower up help support further these kinds of joint operations? Well, as you've heard, just having these amount of resources, having to discretionary time to go after the most violent offenders. We're doing it already. And that's part of our overall strategy. Sean, you and I've talked about it. But having additional federal resources and then also having the U.S. attorney that's also, we're doing this work. But to do this, it just shows you how invaluable it is to have our offices back up the budgeted strength.

We're several hundred police officers when we were from a few years ago. The good thing is, is that that's getting turned around. This new police board of police commissioners has given a raise as given command staff raises. We just graduated 18 kids out of the academy a couple weeks ago. We just put 34 in. That's the biggest class that we've had since 2019, and 18 are going to graduate in December. Almost 50 individuals that left our jurisdiction for other jurisdictions. I have sworn back in. I just swore three in last week. I'm going to swear them back. That's big an in an academy class. For the first time, we were outpacing our attrition rate, and we're slowly going to start getting back up to our budget and strength. But it shows how important,

when you have additional people and investigators out there, it shows you how much it can drive down crime, doing it the right way and the strategies that we're in. So it really is important, but what I'm really proud of, even being at historic lows and sworn police officers, look at the job that they're getting done. Look at the work that these men and women are doing. Because we are also leveraging the technology

that you heard Director Rob Sikata talk about. You talk about National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. We're doing that crime gun intelligence, and we're one of the best in the country. If we can add to it, like the director says they're proposing to do, we will take it. It's a win-win. And just to make sure that we're doing everything we can. We will take all federal resources and we will work in conjunctionally fairly with the community

and let the community know what we're doing. And those are the things that we need. Yes, we've got to get back up, Sean. You hear me talk about it. Everyone in the room I see, we do talk about it. We're going to get ourselves back up. But it takes time. It takes 18 months to train police officers to get them on the street.

so I just can't hire them tomorrow. We had a busload of 200 officers that were qualified to be police officers. I would start the academy of 200 with them because we have the room to get them in here. And that's how important it is when you get these additional resources used right. You see in tremendous results. And we're going to continue to work with them. They're not leaving. That was just an additional surge.

But we, they're embedded here and you heard Senator Schmidt talk about highest per capita FBI agents in our region. That's the investigation. You heard the U.S. Marshals. had an operation earlier this year. But they were part of this operation. They're part of an operation every single day working with the office. More offices I have, more discretionary work they can do because our number one priority is to answer 911 calls. After that, I have to figure out ways to do our crime strategies, which we're doing. So the answer is yes, we could use a few more offices,

but at the same time, we will take the resources and when done properly like you that we're talking about today, it is a win-win for the city of St. Louis in the region. hope to see these federal operations continue in our region. You know, one agency in town is ICE. So there was a situation last week at Lambert Airport. An ICE agent left an unmarked vehicle. It caused traffic to stop at Lambert for hours. So how do you ensure that these agents and these operations

go smoothly so these hiccups don't happen? It was right before a press conference we had at Lambert actually. I think look, thank God. There's no sanctuary. jurisdiction in Missouri because the real problem with that status here's what it means in real in real time that sanctuary jurisdiction they will not inform federal law enforcement when somebody who is in jail or prison is being released so the problem with that is then ice has to go into

the community right and go find the person and arrest them and you know these are complicated situations sometimes and so the best thing that can happen is that you have this sort of cooperation And so when people are being released from jail, it's an easy thing. The community is safe. And so that's how ICE is operating in Missouri. I'm confident of that. And I think that, look, Tom mentioned this, that, you know, whether it's FBI, ATF, all these agencies are fully invested. And I don't know, you know, they may never be a time when I'm in the Senate where there's as much alignment or I have as much influence or whatever with an administration.

to focus on Missouri. I don't know that that'll ever happen. So I have a sense of urgency about all of this. I want to make sure that we're getting all the help we can on violent crime. I want to make sure we have growth in the region. I want to see a modern airport. And those are the big three priorities. But again, on a human level, and reputationalally, I just can't think of anything more important than reducing violent crime in St. Louis. With that Lambert incident, is that a question of training? I don't know the specifics. There was a car. You know, I don't really know what happened there. Clearly, I don't think that's what was supposed to happen, but I don't really know the circumstances of that incident. But I can tell you that the men and women of ICE, you know, do very important, difficult work. They're dangerous people who are here illegally. And their job is to enforce federal immigration law.

And that means you need to leave. And I support them in that mission. Yes, just one final remark. The president and the Attorney General will fully support our law enforcement. federal, state, and local. We're glad to have the support of everyone here. Glad to have this operation shows such amazing successes

after such a short period. And we're glad to keep working with our great friends here with the police commissioner and ATF, Marshal Service, DEA, everyone else. And that's it. Appreciate it. Thanks, folks. Thank you so much for joining us. And don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video.

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