Homeland Security investigators who specialize in money laundering are raiding restaurants and other small businesses looking for immigrants who aren’t authorized to work.
As U.S. President Donald Trump pledges to deport “millions and millions” of “criminal aliens,“ thousands of federal law enforcement officials from multiple agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime-fighting resources away on other areas -- from drug trafficking and terrorism to sexual abuse and fraud.
“I do not recall ever seeing this wide a spectrum of federal government resources all being turned toward immigration enforcement,“ said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former Homeland Security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. “When you’re telling agencies to stop what you’ve been doing and do this now, whatever else they were doing takes a back seat.”
The Trump administration has offered no comprehensive accounting of the revamp. But it echoes the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, when Congress created the Department of Homeland Security that pulled together 169,000 federal employees from other agencies and refocused the FBI on battling terrorism.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in an interview with Reuters, denied the changes across federal law enforcement were hindering other important criminal investigations. “I completely reject the idea that because we’re prioritizing immigration that we are not simultaneously full-force going after violent crime.”
Almost immediately, federal law enforcement started posting photos of the crackdown to social media: agents wore body armor and jackets emblazoned with names of multiple agencies – including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as ATF – during raids on immigrants without proper legal status.
But since Trump’s inauguration, about 80% of its roughly 2,500 agents have been ordered to take on at least some immigration enforcement tasks, two officials familiar with ATF’s operations said. The ATF agents are being used largely as “fugitive hunters” to find migrants living in the U.S. illegally, one of the officials said.
Many of the reassigned federal officials have had little training or experience in immigration law, the sources said. The State Department’s 2,500 Security Service agents, for instance, typically protect diplomats and root out visa and passport fraud. They’ve been authorized to assist with “investigating, determining the location of, and apprehending, any alien” in the U.S. unlawfully, according to a February 18 memo from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to the U.S. Secretary of State.
The changes coincide with extraordinary immigration measures that have prompted dozens of lawsuits claiming that Trump’s presidency is exceeding constitutional limits and other legal boundaries. These include deporting alleged members of a Venezuelan gang under an 18th-century wartime powers act and detaining a Columbia University student activist with legal permanent residency status over his role in pro-Palestinian protests.
“STOP AND FRISK”
Until January, pursuing immigrants living in the country illegally was largely the job of just two agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Protection, with a combined staff of 80,000. Other departments spent little time on deportations.
At Homeland Security Investigations, the top investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, scores of agents who specialize in child sexual exploitation have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, said Matthew Allen, a former senior HSI official who now leads the Association of Customs and HSI Special Agents, whose members include about 1,000 current and former agents.
While HSI falls under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, its team of 7,100 special agents typically play little part in routine immigration enforcement. They usually probe national security threats, terrorism, drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal arms exports, financial crimes, child sex crimes and intellectual property theft. Immigration enforcement has been left to another ICE branch known as Enforcement and Removal Operations.
Going forward, the memo said, HSI special agents and other employees should be prepared to play an increasingly critical role in detaining and deporting immigrants, or barring their entry at U.S. borders.
HSI’s new work also includes checking if companies have hired unauthorized immigrants, surveillance outside of immigrant workers’ homes, taking down license plates and distributing photos of “target” immigrants to detain, according to an employee and photos of the operations shared with Reuters. At the IRS, criminal investigation agents, who typically probe a variety of tax and financial crimes, were being redirected into the immigration operations, Reuters previously reported.
The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
On the second day of Trump’s administration, a top Justice Department official, Emil Bove, told federal prosecutors in a memo that they should “take all steps necessary” to prosecute illegal immigrants for crimes in the U.S.
As a result, federal prosecutors, who typically handle a variety of crimes, have been inundated with immigration cases, two of the sources said.
In Detroit – where immigration prosecutions have been rare – the number of people charged with immigration offenses rose from two in February 2024 to 19 last month, Reuters found.
Since January, however, DEA agents have been ordered to reopen cases, involving arrests up to five years old, where prosecutors had declined to bring charges, two people involved in the work said.
As Trump and billionaire Elon Musk slash the size of the federal bureaucracy, jobs that deal with immigration enforcement appear largely exempt.
In a January 31 email to ICE employees, a human resources official told them they wouldn’t be eligible for the retirement buyouts offered to some 2.3 million federal workers. “All ICE positions are excluded,“ said the previously unreported email, shared with Reuters.
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