The U.S. Marshals Service has located and returned dozens of missing children in Memphis, Tennessee, over the past several weeks, the law enforcement agency announced.
“We are happy that we have been able to use our fugitive hunting skills to assist local and state authorities with finding these missing children,” Emily Williams, a U.S. Marshals spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“What a testament to our partnerships to be able to work these cases together. While investigative work is tedious, locating missing and endangered children is one of the things we are most proud of.”
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said that it would launch a multi-agency effort to reduce crime in Memphis, which is among the most violent major U.S. cities.
He said the goal would be to reduce crime, as was the case in Washington, where the National Guard was sent and the city’s local police force was federalized. Other cities have also had National Guard deployments this year, including Los Angeles and Chicago.
“This task force will be a replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts here,” Trump said of federal efforts in Washington during his signing of the Memphis order in September. “And you’ll see it’s a lot of the same thing, although the numbers here are really something, they’re really bad.”
West Memphis, Arkansas, which is a suburb of about 23,000 residents just west of Memphis, had the second-highest murder rate in the United States, at 72 per 100,000 residents, according to the data.
The federal efforts got some local pushback.
“For many Memphians, the very mention of the National Guard recalls painful memories from 1968,” Canale said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times at the time, calling the deployment of troops “at best, a short-term measure.”