By the Kansas City FBI
As we bring 2025 to a close, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about what your FBI office here in Kansas City accomplished this year to make our communities throughout Missouri and Kansas safer. Reducing violent crime and drug-related violence was a top priority at our offices around Kansas and western Missouri. This year, our office conducted 55 large scale drug seizures. Each of these operations allowed us to remove a wide variety of illicit drugs out of our communities, including the seizure of tens of thousands of deadly fentanyl pills in just one operation. We also took hundreds of firearms, including fully automatic weapons, from subjects who possessed them illegally.
This summer, FBI Kansas City, along with our partners in Homeland Security Investigations, stood up Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTF) in both Kansas and Missouri. The mission of the HSTFs is to combat international drug cartels operating in the U.S. and around the world. The HSTFs will accomplish this mission the same way our Joint Terrorism Task Forces have countered terrorist threats for over three decades, by creating a whole of government approach that allows each participating federal, state and local law enforcement partner to bring their own unique authorities and capabilities to our common mission of reducing illegal drugs in our communities and the drug-related violence they bring. The HSTF has already had a positive impact on our community, and I will post links to several of our offices’ operational successes at the end of this article.
We also remained dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable among us through our multi-agency Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force (CEHTTF). Unfortunately, the CEHTTF is one of the most operationally active squads here in KC. Nearly every day, this squad is either conducting searches or arrests of subjects suspected of sexually abusing children here in our area, around the U.S., or around the world. When I speak about this threat with those outside of law enforcement, it always shocks them when they hear about the scale of this problem. I ask if you or anyone you know suspects that a child is being exploited or sexually abused, please contact your local police or our office.
While I am very proud to speak about our accomplishments countering our traditional criminal threats, I also want to acknowledge the quiet work our personnel did behind the scenes to uphold our national security mandate. Our professionals upheld our national security responsibilities by protecting the region from terrorist attacks, as well as, from our adversaries attempting to steal the technology driving our economy or attack the infrastructure critical to maintaining our way of life.
Protecting the United States from terrorism is the FBI’s number one priority. Here in Kansas City, our counterterrorism efforts resulted in the arrests and prosecution of US citizens and foreign nationals executing or planning attacks here in the US or abroad. These counterterrorism efforts will continue next year as Kansas City hosts the 2026 World Cup. The FBI’s Agents, Intelligence professionals and special capability teams will continue working with all our local, state and federal partners to protect the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the area throughout the World Cup and all of 2026.
Lastly, I’d like to mention the importance of our relationships with our law enforcement partners. While statistics are important, I prefer not to focus on numbers in this type of commentary because, without context, numbers usually mean little to the people reading them. Instead, our preferred metric for our work is the relationships we have with other law enforcement professionals and agencies that we work with every day on our common mission. In 2025, the FBI office in Kansas City endeavored to be an indispensable partner to our local, state and federal partners tasked with making our communities safer.
I hope next time you have the opportunity to speak with one of the dozens of Police Chiefs or Sheriffs throughout our region you will ask about their agency’s relationship with the FBI and the value we provide.
As we head into 2026, I will continue our office’s dedication to strengthening the relationships we have and forging new ones across both states to further reduce violent crime, get illegal drugs out of our communities, defend the most vulnerable, and protect our national security.
Stephen Cyrus
Special Agent in Charge
No comments:
Post a Comment