Office of Investigations

National Program Manager Karen Ratke

When Karen Ratke joined up with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1992, she saw her career choice as an opportunity to employ her foreign language skills – she’s fluent in Spanish and proficient in French – while serving her country.

Thirteen years later, she’s serving with the Financial and Trade Investigations Division’s Cornerstone Unit, providing critical liaison to ICE field offices across the country as well as to the casino and gaming industry – an industry that’s vulnerable to exploitation by money launderers and other financial criminals.

Ratke’s move into investigations came after four years of service as a District Adjudications Officer, a position in which she interviewed applicants applying for immigration benefits to determine their eligibility. It was “an excellent basis for conducting criminal investigations into immigration benefit fraud violations,” she says.

Ratke became a Special Agent in 1996 and later served for four years on a U.S. Secret Service interagency task force conducting identity fraud and financial investigations. In 2002, she was honored to receive the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) Award for Investigative Excellence for her work on the investigation and prosecution of a human trafficking scheme out of Cameroon. Now assigned to ICE Headquarters, she says her background in investigations makes a big difference in how she approaches her duties now.

“As a Special Agent in the field, I felt a real sense of accomplishment in initiating an investigation, identifying suspects, gathering evidence, and working to obtain a successful prosecution, in addition to knowing that I was providing an important service my country,” Ratke says. “I continued to have that same sense of duty when I came to HQ, and I feel it’s important to provide support to the field agents who are carrying out the investigations and protecting the citizens of our country.”

Ratke’s path from working as an immigration adjudications officer to her current position is an excellent illustration of ICE’s own evolution in bringing together the investigative powers of the legacy INS and Customs components to form a powerful new law enforcement agency.