The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday it will increase the number of FBI agents assigned to Indian Country nationwide, including Montana.
The FBI will send 60 personnel in 90-day temporary assignments over a six-month period at 10 offices across the country.
Those offices are: Albuquerque, Denver, Detroit, Jackson, Miss., Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Portland, Ore. Seattle, and Salt Lake City.
Cases in Montana are handled through the Salt Lake City office.
The FBI will be assisted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs Missing and Murdered Unit, using modern forensic evidence processing to solve cases, according to DOJ.
“We are very pleased that the FBI is dispatching additional resources to the Salt Lake City Division, which covers Montana, to assist our ongoing efforts to find missing indigenous persons and hold violent offenders accountable. I want to thank the agents already working on these cases in Montana from both the FBI and the BIA’s Missing and Murdered Unit. Together with the Tribal Community Response Plans facilitated by DOJ for each Montana reservation community and DOJ’s MMIP Regional Outreach Program, this deployment will help address this critical problem. Missing and murdered indigenous people will not be forgotten,” said U.S. Attorney for Montana Kurt Alme.
The plan is called Operation Not Forgotten, which has provided investigative support to over 500 cases in the past two years.
According to a DOJ news release, it was launched during President Donald Trump's first term and has been deployed three times.
