Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
10.04.2025
“It’s a good time to be an American-born criminal,” said one expert, as ICE’s dragnet now includes thousands of agents from other federal law enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait in Federal Plaza Immigration Court in New York City to detain noncitizens after their status hearings, regardless of the judges’ ruling, in June 2025.
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President Donald Trump and his top advisers have set aggressive goals for deporting historic numbers of immigrants. But “the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History,” as Trump described it, requires officers — lots of them. Far more, it turns out, than Immigration and Customs Enforcement has on staff. So the administration is shifting tens of thousands of personnel from other federal agencies to help ICE, raising concerns that other law enforcement priorities are being neglected.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, reported last month that the agency has diverted more than 28,000 federal law enforcement agents from other jobs. As of late August, one in five U.S. marshals and FBI agents, almost half of DEA agents, and over two-thirds of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives personnel were working to arrest immigrants instead of doing their primary jobs, Cato found. That’s in addition to thousands of state and local police officers who have been trained to act as ICE agents under the controversial 287(g) program. Just one in five people working in the mass deportation efforts are actually ICE enforcement and removal officers, according to the report. The rest are on loan from other agencies.
The shift in priorities has wide-reaching implications for the law enforcement work these officers usually do. The number of people charged with federal drug crimes has dropped to its lowest level since at least the late 1990s, Reuters reported this week. Compared with the first nine months of last year, 24% fewer people this year have been charged with money laundering, a charge often used against suspected drug traffickers, the news agency found, and 10% fewer people were charged with drug crimes overall.
“It’s a good time to be an American-born criminal,” Jason Houser, who was ICE’s chief of staff under President Joe Biden, told The Marshall Project in an interview. “When the FBI, DEA, ATF are all doing checkpoints in [Chicago’s] Little Italy tomorrow, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the Jeffrey Epsteins, the fentanyl traffickers — they don’t quit.”
In May, the FBI ordered its agents to scale back investigations of white-collar crime and focus on immigration instead. In Baltimore, FBI agents on the city’s domestic terrorism squad were investigating online child predators when they were ordered to work full-time on immigration enforcement, MSNBC reported. About 10 agents were reportedly reassigned from building cases against what the FBI described as a “nihilistic violent extremist” group in order to help the Department of Homeland Security arrest immigrants.
Not since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has federal law enforcement seen such a wholesale realignment of its priorities, experts say. “If their goal is to reduce the flow of drugs into the U.S., to reduce gang violence, to reduce violent crime — taking federal investigators away from terrorism investigations, fugitive operations, drug investigations, so they can engage in civil immigration enforcement, will probably not help them achieve their goals,” John D. Cohen, a homeland security expert who served under Republican and Democratic administrations, told The Marshall Project in an interview.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that “Immigration security IS national security and protects America from criminals.” Jackson cited examples of recent arrests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to prove that “the President can walk and chew gum at the same time — we’re holding all criminals accountable, whether they’re illegal aliens or American citizens.”
But critics cite the shows of military force in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, along with efforts to target so-called “sanctuary cities,” as additional examples of diverting federal law enforcement priorities to immigration. During Trump’s “D.C. crime surge,” FBI agents in the nation’s capital whose work usually focuses on financial fraud and public corruption were spending two or three nights a week patrolling the streets, The New York Times reported, sidelining their other work. Meanwhile, at the Justice Department, a daily briefing on threats facing the nation has been gutted of its expertise as top national security advisers were reassigned from their posts to focus on sanctuary cities, according to The Washington Post. Even U.S. Postal Inspection Service officers, usually tasked with protecting postal employees and preventing drugs and child pornography from being sent through the mail, have been reassigned to a Homeland Security immigration task force, The Washington Post reported this spring.
“We are deeply disturbed that the Department is redirecting resources from the prosecution of violent crimes to the pursuit of dubious claims against so-called ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions,” Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in March, asking that she “reverse any personnel decisions that diverted resources away from the Department’s critical national security and public safety missions.” Bondi did not reply, according to Josh Sorbe, a spokesman for Democrats on the committee.
Trump began drastically reshaping federal law enforcement priorities almost immediately after the start of his second term, from sidelining environmental enforcement to reducing prosecutions for white-collar crimes. The changes are part of a new zeitgeist that goes beyond the focus on immigration enforcement. Within days of his inauguration, Trump ordered the Justice Department to pause enforcement of the law that prohibits U.S. businesspeople from bribing foreign officials. A team at the Justice Department that had investigated foreign kleptocrats for 14 years was disbanded in February. The Justice Department also disbanded a unit investigating cryptocurrency fraud as part of its broad plans to back away from cryptocurrency enforcement, and ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission to drop ongoing cases against several crypto companies.
Juliette Kayyem, a Homeland Security official under President Barack Obama, said that she’s worried about the investigations and arrests that drug and counterterrorism officers aren’t able to perform while they focus on immigration. It isn’t just the lessened capacity of those agencies to do their jobs.
“For decades, our homeland defenses have been focused on an all-hazards approach because we are a complex country: climate disasters, cyber intrusions, border enforcement, terrorism, critical infrastructure disruptions, or maritime and aviation vulnerabilities,” Kayyem told The Marshall Project. “Now, it isn’t just DHS that has a singular focus. It is our entire federal apparatus. It is as if they are imagining a world where nothing else is worrisome except the border.”
