ATF shifts – In Trump’s second term, the ATF has moved away from Biden-era gun-trafficking enforcement—cutting referrals, ending “zero tolerance,” and redirecting agents toward immigration operations—while criminologists warn the effects of a weaker pipeline crackdown can
When Marianna Mitchem talks about the gun pipeline, she doesn’t start with policy. She starts with April 1999—when her high school soccer team in the Denver suburbs faced Columbine High, and then the next day a rampage killed more than a dozen people.
Mitchem later joined the Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco. Firearms and Explosives and came up through the ATF’s Denver office as an industry operations investigator. inspecting firearms dealers’ background checks and sales records. For years. when the bureau found discrepancies. it tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans rather than revoking a license.
But in 2021, that posture changed. As the U.S. experienced a surge of deadly violence. with homicides up more than a third since 2019. the Biden administration pushed a harder line: in June 2021. it announced what became known as “zero tolerance. ” under which dealers found to be willfully violating the law would lose their licenses—period. Revocations rose sharply, from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.
The push was reinforced from the Justice Department side. In 2021. Attorney General Merrick Garland began urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. and a year later Congress passed a law adding a firearms trafficking conspiracy charge to the federal criminal code. It was a crucial new tool for prosecutors.
By the end of that period, Mitchem said the ATF was making “incredible progress on trafficking, on violent crime.” She had risen to associate assistant director for industry operations, overseeing inspectors across the country.
Then Trump returned to the White House in 2024, and the trajectory shifted fast.
The Trump administration repealed the zero-tolerance policy. invited revoked dealers to reapply for new licenses. shifted hundreds of ATF agents to immigration work. and scaled back on prosecutions for gun trafficking. The White House declined to comment, directing questions to the ATF and the Department of Justice.
In practice, that change showed up in the numbers. During Trump’s first year, the ATF referred 30% fewer gun-trafficking charges than the year before. The number of referrals prosecutors declined also rose.
At the same time, a major operational diversion took place inside the agency itself. Large numbers of ATF agents were shifted away from enforcing gun laws to helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement in campaigns against undocumented immigrants. ICE records obtained by the libertarian Cato Institute in September showed that nearly 1. 800 of ATF’s roughly 2. 500 agents had taken part in enforcement and removal operations.
The decline in trafficking work was visible not just in the field but in the pipeline of cases reaching prosecutors. ATF referrals for common trafficking-related charges—including the two added in the 2022 law—decreased 15% in 2025 from 2024. according to a ProPublica analysis. When asked about the drop, ATF spokesperson Tanya Roman pointed to prosecutors. “Not every ATF referral is accepted by the [United States Attorney’s Office] for prosecution. ” she said in a written response.
For Mitchem, the reversal wasn’t theoretical. She watched it happen while she was still in government, and then left the ATF last spring after 21 years. She joined Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.
“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it,” Mitchem told her audience in a way that sounded more like frustration than rhetoric. “It just means they’re not being intercepted.”
“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”
Criminologists say that warning has a timetable of its own. Even though the homicide rate fell further last year. researchers caution against complacency because gun trafficking is a classic pipeline problem: the damage can take time to arrive. Research found that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to about three years—meaning any positive lag from the Biden-era crackdown could still be playing out now. while any negative effects from a pullback might appear later.
The human cost of those delays is harder to measure than a staffing memo, but it can be traced.
In one case described in the reporting. a gun that would be used to kill a young man in Connecticut had been bought six days earlier in Raleigh. North Carolina. The victim. Tylon Hardy. was fatally shot in the back in Middletown. Connecticut. after a confrontation in a low-income housing development. The gun was a Taurus 9 mm pistol purchased from Smokin’ Barrel Guns and Ammo in Raleigh more than 600 miles away.
Investigators obtained camera footage from the shop showing a young man emerging after the purchase to make a call on his cellphone. The case unfolded with indictments pursued by Michael Easley Jr., the Biden-nominated U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. who charged four people in a conspiracy to traffic dozens of guns from shops in eastern and central North Carolina. The ringleader had bought more than 100 guns from straw purchasers; 10 of the guns surfaced at crime scenes in Connecticut and New Jersey. The ringleader pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison. while the other three received sentences ranging from 18 months to five years.
Easley’s approach relied on chasing short “time to crime” from NIBIN data. His office would focus on guns with a quick turnaround from initial sale and attempt to build leads from purchase records. He also made the interest plain to the local ATF division. telling that the federal prosecution team could “send a demand signal to the marketplace of agents.”.
Under Biden, other parts of the enforcement machine were put in motion as well. In April 2022. the ATF issued a rule requiring ghost guns to conform to the same regulations as regular firearms. including carrying serial numbers and requiring background checks. Two months later, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, with Republican support from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. The law added a new straw-purchasing charge. expanded background checks for buyers under 21. provided funding for states with red-flag laws permitting gun confiscations. and—alongside the 2022 firearms trafficking conspiracy charge—gave prosecutors another pathway.
In 2024, the ATF’s aggressive licensing action still had consequences, but the direction reversed after Trump’s return. Revocations rose yet further in 2024. to 183—still only a sliver of dealers. about 2% of those inspected that year—prompting renewed ire from groups including the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the National Rifle Association. as well as gun-owner groups with more aggressively anti-regulation stances.
Some dealers challenged revocations in federal court. In 2023. the ATF revoked the license of a shop in the Phoenix suburbs. Chambered Group. after four inspections in five years found a host of violations. The business tried unsuccessfully to block the revocation; a federal judge. Steven Logan. found the business had “purposefully disregarded [federal] regulations by repeatedly violating the same regulations despite being given multiple opportunities to cure its mistakes.” In 2024. one of the shop’s co-owners tried to get a new license under a slightly different name. Chambered Custom Firearms. and the ATF blocked him. noting the past role with the revoked store. (A lawyer for the shop declined to comment.).
After Trump returned. the administration announced an end to zero tolerance. urged revoked dealers to reapply. and started settling court cases. In April 2025. the DOJ informed the court that it had started settlement talks in the Arizona case. and in a month’s time told it that Chambered Custom had submitted a new application. “which ATF will expeditiously process.” The license was issued in July.
In Oregon, the dispute mirrored the same question: whether the new posture would leave dealers without a meaningful pathway back. A dealer there sought to challenge the ATF’s 2024 denial of his license renewal for South Valley Firearms in the town of Monroe due to his past conviction for domestic violence. Trump’s DOJ initially contested the bid. but earlier this year notified the lawyer. Leonard Williamson. that the department would grant the license. Williamson said the department provided no explanation and told him to have the client resubmit the application.
All of it feeds into Mitchem’s central worry: enforcement choices today can shape outcomes years later, and the pipeline doesn’t pause because political priorities change.
Beyond the trafficking crackdown and staffing shifts, there has also been movement on the agency’s rules and oversight powers. On April 29. right after being confirmed as ATF director. Robert Cekada announced 34 proposed rule changes. including requiring dealers to hold records for only 20 or 30 years. not indefinitely. and limiting ATF scrutiny of state-issued permits that can replace background checks for buyers. “We are proposing to remove unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses. ” he said. flanked by leaders of the NRA and National Shooting Sports Foundation.
One Biden-era reform has persisted: a crackdown on ghost guns. The 2022 ATF regulation survived a Supreme Court challenge last year. and lawsuits by several cities helped drive the leading producer of ghost guns out of business. Webster and other criminologists note that the reduced flow of ghost guns correlates with a sharply lower rate of shootings by teenagers. who were heavy users of the guns during the 2020-21 homicide surge.
Even so, the ghost-gun issue had appeared at risk of reopening. In early April. a joint status report issued to the federal court in Texas where the case originated stated that “ATF has advised that it plans to take agency action to amend the challenged rule” despite the Supreme Court upholding it. A day later. the White House’s 2027 budget called for reversing “the imposition of excessive restrictions on homemade firearms.” Five days after that. DOJ notified the court that “the government has decided to maintain the definition” underlying the ghost gun rule. Asked for clarification. Roman said the ATF is conducting legal reviews for other. more technically challenging rules. and that if changes are needed following the review. a proposal will be published.
For now, as the reporting frames it, one key “valve in the pipeline remains closed”—while other parts of the pipeline are left exposed.
The contradiction—visible in both structure and sequence—has become harder to ignore: as ATF agents and industry inspectors devote time to immigration enforcement and the referral pipeline shrinks. trafficking prosecutions are still happening. but a growing share is being channeled into the newest trafficking conspiracy charges added in 2022.
ATF delays in making its licensing data public also add to the sense of mismatch between what the public is told and what can be measured. Cekada challenged a report last fall that 80% of ATF’s agents had been reassigned to immigration enforcement. saying the reassignment had never amounted to more than 100 agents at a given time and telling senators that the ATF’s work “has been focused on offenders that were illegally armed with firearms.” Yet it took more than 15 months for the administration to release a tally of how many dealer licenses it had revoked: 56 in 2025. down 69% from the year before.
At the Center for American Progress conference in Washington last December. Mitchem described the pullback in blunt terms for advocates: they would have to look to officials in their home states and cities to fill the void. “It’s up to the states to start tackling this trafficking problem. because unfortunately. you’re not going to have the support of the ATF. ” she said.
In the suburbs of Philadelphia. county sheriffs began doing more inspections of dealers to make up for the decline in ATF enforcement after a pandemic-era homicide spike that later improved. Mitchem’s response to what else states could do was uncertain—reflecting. perhaps. how starkly a federal resource can’t be replaced by local paperwork.
What’s left is a political shift with operational consequences, and, in Mitchem’s view, a dangerous lag.
“Everyone’s been in a little bit of shock about what’s going on,” she said.
And if the premise is right—that trafficking enforcement is the kind of work where the harm can arrive later—the real test of the Trump reversal may not land in this news cycle at all.
ATF Trump Biden gun trafficking zero tolerance ICE Merrick Garland firearms trafficking conspiracy charge ghost guns Robert Cekada Marianna Mitchem Everytown Everytown analysis NIBIN NICS Brady United Daniel Webster Thom Tillis Daryl McCormick