U.S. Attorney McGrath is focused on environment, guns and fentanyl as San Diego’s top federal prosecutor

Tara McGrath has served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California for a little more than seven months, and depending on the outcome of this year’s presidential election, she could already be halfway done with her term.

If former President Donald Trump wins back the White House in November, McGrath and other U.S. attorneys appointed by President Joe Biden will be expected to resign as part of a routine process that happens each time a new administration takes office.

McGrath said she doesn’t think about how long her tenure will be. “I don’t think that this is my job,” she said during an interview last month in a conference room at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown San Diego. “I’m a custodian of the United States attorney title.”

However long her term ends up lasting, McGrath wants to spend that time focusing on her priorities — fortifying public safety, building public trust in law enforcement and enhancing the office’s already strong record of environmental prosecutions. And within the public safety portion of her priorities, she highlighted her office’s attention on human trafficking, fentanyl and ghost guns and other firearm offenses.

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McGrath’s term as U.S. attorney in one of the nation’s busiest districts got off to a late start because it took the Biden administration 26 months to nominate her. Some in San Diego’s legal community expressed frustration as the lack of a nomination for the important position wore on, though others attributed the long delay to the focus by California Sen. Alex Padilla and the Biden administration on staffing the courts with new federal judges. There were six openings on the local bench when Padilla took office, and filling those judicial vacancies was a priority for the White House, as federal judges carry lifetime appointments and therefore leave a longer imprint on the justice system than U.S. attorneys.

McGrath said the wait allowed her to think long and deeply about how best to do the job. And because she had left the office several years earlier for a different position, it gave her time to study the office from an outsider’s perspective.

McGrath was sworn in as the new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California by Chief District Judge Dana Sabraw on Oct. 5 at the Carter-Keep Courthouse in downtown San Diego.

(Meg McLaughlin/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

McGrath started her legal career in 2001 as a judge advocate while on active duty in the Marine Corps and began working as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego in 2008. In 2015, while still technically part of the San Diego office, she was detailed to serve as a trial attorney for the Department of Justice’s Office of Enforcement Operations in Washington, D.C. She returned to San Diego in 2018, then left the office in 2019 to join the DOJ as a civilian litigation attorney adviser for the Marine Corps in the Pacific region.

While most of her experience has been as a military attorney or federal prosecutor, she spent an important two years from 2005 to 2007 as the director of the south coast office for the Coastal Conservation League, a South Carolina-based environmental organization.

“This is something I care a lot about,” she said. “I’m also an avid conservationist, I’m a committed conservationist.”

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McGrath said she wants to enhance what has historically been one of the office’s strengths. “This office has been at the forefront nationwide of environmental prosecutions for a long time,” she said. She added that over the past four fiscal years, the San Diego office has been responsible for about 40 percent of all federal environmental prosecutions.

She hopes to expand the office’s capabilities even further. In March, her office filed the nation’s first ever charges alleging illegal importation of greenhouse gases into the U.S. McGrath said her office expects to file more such cases and is working to train customs officers at the border so that they know how to identify greenhouse gas-causing products.

Early in her tenure, McGrath put out a call to the prosecutors in her office asking who would be interested in taking on environmental cases. “Hands flew in the air,” she said.

Now her office is creating a training for the assistant U.S. attorneys new to prosecuting environmental crimes and plans to offer that training to other districts around the country.

“We are thinking about how we can protect the community through environmental prosecutions, through environmental justice,” she said, adding that DOJ is supportive of the efforts. “And locally, when I’m thinking about how we can advance those priorities here, it was heartening to see so many hands raised in the air, because ... we are uniquely suited in this district to have an impact there, because we’re a border district, because of our natural resources and because of our institutionalized productivity in this area.”

McGrath is also pushing her prosecutors to join law enforcement task forces in the region. It’s not a new practice, but it’s something she’s emphasizing in order to strengthen those relationships. She said it also helps so that prosecutors know what cases built on long-term investigations might be coming. And the prosecutors can offer investigators support with legal questions and writing and applying for search warrants.

McGrath said she has also increased training on handling gun cases, with a special focus on illegal homemade firearms known as ghost guns. “We are evaluating gun cases on a daily basis, in conjunction with law enforcement partners both local and federal ... And we have more than doubled the amount of prosecutors who are handling gun cases; we’ve expanded our prosecutions to include ghost guns.”

She said budget cuts have limited what the office can do in terms of hiring and resources. Instead, “we’re really tightening the belt and focusing acutely on priorities,” she said.

Among the biggest and most important of her priorities is fighting the fentanyl epidemic.

“Our unique role as federal prosecutors is reaching as far as we can up the chain, toward the suppliers,” McGrath said. “That’s the role that we fill here at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We identify the networks — whether in this country or outside — that are bringing in illegal substances ... and target those incredibly deadly and destructive substances through the networks that are funneling them in.”

McGrath said her office, while continuing to focus on the larger drug-trafficking networks, will not slow down on charging lower-level dealers who sell fentanyl that leads to overdose deaths.

“We are absolutely going to continue to prosecute those cases,” McGrath said. “We are uniquely suited to bring a different type of charge than the state can in those cases ... Often in a case like an overdose death, the federal sentence is more severe. And in my opinion, for someone who deals fentanyl, knows it’s deadly and continues to deal fentanyl, that most severe sentence is absolutely appropriate.”

McGrath said her office’s role goes beyond the courtroom. She highlighted various community outreach initiatives the office has been involved in — such as the fentanyl awareness campaign it launched last year in partnership with the San Diego State men’s basketball team just months after the team’s appearance in the Final Four.

She also pointed out that fentanyl deaths in San Diego County have recently plateaued after soaring from 92 deaths in 2018 to 814 in 2021. The next year there was only one more death than the year prior.

“That is still 815 too many deaths, it is a terrible statistic, but there is some consolation in the fact that it has plateaued,” she said.

She also noted, citing statistics from the county Medical Examiner’s Office, that the number of young people who died from fentanyl overdoses dropped significantly in recent years. In 2021, there were 41 deaths of people 21 years old or younger; in 2023 that number dropped to 15.

“That number gives a great deal of hope from the way it was looking,” McGrath said. “And it truly is a collaborative effort. Like I said, it is 815 deaths too many, but you take the wins where you can get them and the plateau is a good sign. Now we need to see a decrease.”