Nearly half of the FBI agents working in the US’s major field offices have been reassigned to aid immigration enforcement, according to newly released data, a stunning shift in law enforcement priorities that has raised public safety concerns.
Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with the Guardian, suggests the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest field offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all of the FBI’s offices, 23% of the roughly 13,000 total agents at the bureau are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
Warner’s office said the FBI agents now deployed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent have been taken away from their work tackling cybercrimes, drug trafficking, terrorism, espionage, violent crimes, counterintelligence and other efforts that are part of the bureau’s mission – some areas that Trump has claimed are White House priorities.
The data, first reported by the Washington Post, suggests the FBI is dramatically shifting its objectives in an effort to back Trump’s increasingly aggressive immigration raids, with the administration targeting 3,000 daily arrests and seeking to expand its detention capacity to detain more than 100,000 immigrants.
The data is understating the scale of the reorganization, as the FBI only provided counts for agents who are now spending more than half of their job doing immigration enforcement, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now dedicated to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of the agents had been redirected to DHS.
“When you pull a quarter of the FBI’s top agents off the front lines of fighting terrorists, spies, drug traffickers, and violent criminals, the consequences are clear: critical national security work gets sidelined, and our country is put at greater risk,” Warner said in a statement.
The transformation of the FBI has raised alarms about the potential consequences for communities targeted by immigration raids and the impact on the work the bureau is abandoning, experts said.
Mike German, a former FBI agent and civil liberties advocate, said it was unprecedented for the bureau to redirect this many agents to a mission that is not part of the FBI’s mandate. Some agents might be eager to support the president’s immigration agenda while others likely oppose the redirection, he said: “Part of the reason FBI leadership would be doing this at such scale is to separate those two – to identify who are the loyalists and who are potential impediments to the administration’s goals.”
The move is in line with FBI director Kash Patel’s efforts to purge the bureau of agents seen as disloyal to Trump, German said, noting reports of the termination of personnel involved in the January 6 investigation.
FBI agents, he said, are generally trained as investigators who may make targeted arrests, a job that significantly differs from those of many immigration enforcement officers, which could lead to problems in the field during immigration raids. “Just jumping in an SUV with a bunch of armed men and rolling around the streets until you see someone running away is inherently a more dangerous type of activity they are not very well trained for,” German said.
There has been extensive documentation of the violent and indiscriminate nature of the Ice raids, which have often been carried out by masked men and have at times led to the detention of US citizens, and adding FBI personnel to the mix could exacerbate the chaos and potential for abuses, the former agent said.
The exact tasks and responsibilities of the FBI agents now working alongside Ice are unclear. Spokespeople for DHS, Ice, the FBI and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
German, an FBI whistleblower who has spoken out about the civil rights abuses of the bureau’s intelligence work, said he was most concerned about the agency shifting away from public corruption and white-collar crime, offenses state and local agencies don’t have capacity to tackle: “That’s where the real harm will come.”
Current and former FBI agents told the Washington Post there were growing concerns about low morale within the agency and that agents were stretched thin, which could hamper national security investigations and complex cases.
Kenneth Gray, a former FBI agent and professor of practice in the University of New Haven’s criminal justice department, said the shift in priorities resembled the post-9/11 reorganization at the FBI, when counterterrorism became the central focus.
“The bureau can withstand a temporary change in its priorities, but in the long-term, if agents are continuing to work immigration matters, as opposed to counterterrorism, foreign counterintelligence or cybercrimes, that may end up biting us big time,” said Gray, who worked at the bureau for 24 years, before leaving in 2012. “The next 9/11 might happen if agents who were working on counterterrorism have been diverted.”
Gray, however, said he was not concerned about a temporary shift while DHS engages in rapid recruitment of new Ice officers.
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, defended the redirection of FBI resources toward immigration enforcement at a tense Senate hearing earlier this week when she was accused by Democrats of weaponizing the justice department. FBI agents, she said, were working daily with DHS on “keeping Americans safe and getting illegal aliens out of our country”.
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