Grassley urges support for combating organized Retail Crime Act

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) urged congressional action to address the “nationwide scourge of organized retail crime” and endorsed the Grassley-led, bipartisan Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) bill at a July 15^th hearing.

At the hearing, witnesses told the Senate Judiciary committee of the growing threat to retail businesses as well as attacks on trucking and warehousing and cited the role of international criminal and terrorist organizations.

The witnesses included:

• Summer Stephan, President of the National District Attorneys Association and District Attorney for San Diego County;
• David J. Glawe, President and CEO of the National Insurance Crime Bureau;
• Scott McBride, Chief Global Asset Protection Officer for American Eagle Outfitters Inc.
• Donna Lemm, Chief Strategy Officer for IMC Logistics, testifying on behalf of the American Trucking Associations.

Donna Lemm, Chief Strategy Officer for IMC Logistics, noted the impact on trucking: “Motor carriers are the eyes and ears of our supply chain. We see everything. We're the first ones to see if that seal's broken, right? And we're … responsible for that load. And so, when we looked at our own statistics for the past four years, it's staggering …In 2021, we had five reports of cargo theft. And by 2024, we had 876 reports. It's huge.”

Lemm noted: “Thieves targeting freight shipments are costing the supply chain up to $35 billion annually and fueling price inflation for consumers. Strategic theft has risen 1,500% since the first quarter of 2021, and the average value per theft is over $200,000. Cargo theft increases the overall cost to ship goods from point A to point B, and those costs are felt directly by consumers across the United States. Carriers face soaring insurance premiums and costly disruptions that delay deliveries and destabilize supply chains.”

There is an urgency in enacting federal legislation because local law enforcement is often challenged to respond to increasingly militant tactics by bad actors:

“And so often when the local police do come, they may write this whole theft up as vandalism. They're not able immediately to even qualify and quantify what was taken, ... They see the damage when the fences are cut, and it's vandalism ...”

She urged support for the CORCA bill: “I think what we like so much about the CORCA bill is … this standardization of what is cargo theft … How do we aggregate it? I was talking about motor carriers being the eyes and ears of our industry, because we are. We don't have a voice. We don't know where to report. We need a centralized place to report. I explained the incident in St. Louis where we basically had the ATF calling us right? To tell us that ‘we’ve got your (stolen) refrigerators. And so, it's this ability to connect the dots, local, state, and federal that we don't have today.”

Lemm also cited cargo theft of agricultural exports: “First of all, food and beverage is the number one targeted commodity in cargo theft... And why? Demand, of course. It's so difficult to track. It's so easy to distribute. And what is so devastating about that is … the price of food we know already is so high. The average American cringes every time they go to the grocery store. And what happens with these targeted thefts on food is once you have something that's precious, any kind of food, you pick it. … Those costs are immediately passed on to the consumer… What's happened is actually targeting agricultural exports, beef, poultry, perishables. And what we also see that's happening because of so much of this transnational cargo crime is that it is also happening on our railroads… in the meantime, destruction of our ag exports happens when they cut the (container) seals and the integrity of the cargo is lost.

Threats To Retail Workers

Scott McBride, Chief Global Asset Protection Officer for American Eagle Outfitters said retail workers are increasingly terrorized by the growing attacks on stores: “It's the threat of violence and the actual violence that some of my peers have experienced … has grown exponentially over the last decade… My fellow witness here testified to the attitudes of some of the store and shop owners that are concerned for their safety when they're operating their shops. The intimidation tactics to come back and to be able to revictimize the retail locations over and over again has grown so much that we've had to implement additional countermeasures. We've had to train to keep our employees safe. We've had to lock up and hide.”

The situation is so bad, McBride said, that there are parts of the country that are devoid of retail outlets: “All of that leads to a reevaluation of the investment that's being made in new stores, different locations and those types of things. And has in some cases … led to product deserts in some parts of this country because stores have had to close up and leave because they could no longer sustain a viable operation because of the violence, the crime, the theft, and the losses that they are incurring.”

Is DHS a Crime Fighter Unit?

Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) worried that the CORCA bill’s designation of primary authority with the Department of Homeland Security was problematic because DHS’s prime focus today is deportations: “In February, the Department of Homeland Security … ordered its entire investigations division composed of 6,000 agents to divert focus on drug dealers, terrorists and human traffickers, and shift priority to the Trump administration's mission of deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”

He added: “The new focus for the DHS … is in keeping with the President's executive orders that demand a wholesale shift in federal law enforcement resources toward immigration crackdowns, and removal. But (former officials) warn the shift will undermine high profile investigations into some of the most dangerous transnational threats Americans face, including Mexican drug cartels smuggling deadly fentanyl across the border from Mexico. Chris Campanelli, the former HSI (Homeland Security Investigation) supervisor agent, said, ‘A lot of my colleagues were afraid this was going to happen. This is going to be a total train wreck.’”

The apprehension of criminals who have entered the United States illegally is vital: “If anyone's involved in illegally being in the United States, undocumented or otherwise, and is engaged in criminal activity that is dangerous to themselves and others, they should be removed, period. Prosecuted, period. And never let in the first place period.”

In the case of people with no criminal records, “what about those who are living here, who've been here for years, working a job, showing up every day, raising a family … and paying their taxes. Is that a priority over what we're discussing today? Not in my book…”

Importance of Intelligence Gathering

David J. Glawe, President and CEO of the National Insurance Crime Bureau noted that intelligence gathering is critical because increasingly criminal activity is directed by organizations outside the United States: “(I) actually worked on the transnational organized crime strategy under two administrations, I can speak specifically how important it is to have centers so the intelligence and the operation coordinating can be put together. The national security threats and transnational criminal organizations cannot be stated more emphatically, that we need these centers to be able to run this information against classified databases to understand that these are being sponsored by nation states … in North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, or … by terrorist organizations.”

Glawe supports the CORCA bill because: “We know transnational criminal organizations know no boundaries. These are billion-dollar businesses. The Sinaloa Cartel is one of the best known. It runs like a Fortune 500 company, moving people and moving goods. It's all about the money. These organizations have connectivity to nation states and terrorist organizations. And I think this law, CORCA, is a good step in creating a center to identify the illicit goods and the people involved with trafficking those goods globally…”

Republican Senators Support DHS & Deportations

Durbin’s comments drew criticisms from Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas): “Senator Durbin raises a concern that some of the law enforcement authorities that are currently being used to repatriate or deport people with criminal records out of the country that somehow … they are being diverted from other law enforcement activities. But I will note that recently we voted for $170 billion addition to the funding for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), for detention facilities… for personnel and training, and all of our Democratic colleagues voted against it. So, I don't know. You really can't have it both ways.”

Senator Ashley Moody (R-Florida) agreed: “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for introducing the federal legislation Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. I am incredibly proud to be a co-sponsor of that. And … I don't know what it is, but it is increasingly hard for somebody like me that served as a judge and a federal prosecutor and is the wife of a law enforcement officer to watch these statements, for example … And one governor, Newsom out of California, went to a cargo theft site and was like, I don't know what's happening. This looks like a third world country …”

She noted the importance of prosecuting the undocumented: “In fact, I don't think it's a coincidence that in the last three years, the incident rate of cargo theft has gone up 17,000%. And we've also seen unvetted people come into this country by the millions and invited into California, and nobody's picking up on that. How many times have we heard the word transnational criminal organization…?”

Moody concluded by stating that President Trump’s deportation policies have been a success: “In fact, we just rolled out more arrests since Trump's been in office of people here that have been deported time and time again with criminal backgrounds and are stealing from cargo freight. In Florida, we just arrested a ring of people here from Venezuela … who were found to have been responsible for dozens of retail thefts in Florida.