In response to questions from Reuters, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the U.S. government is “mobilizing federal and state law enforcement to find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to respond to questions about its staffing. In a statement, the FBI said it is "protecting the U.S. from many threats.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

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.

Trump’s hardline approach to deporting immigrants has intensified America’s already-stark partisan divide. The U.S. Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, described the crackdown as a “wasteful, misguided diversion of resources.” In a statement to Reuters, he said it was “making America less safe" by drawing agents and officials away from fighting corporate fraud, terrorism, child sexual exploitation and other crimes.

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.”

He said the crackdown was warranted. “President Trump views what has happened over the last couple years truly as an invasion, so that’s how we’re trying to remedy that.”

On January 20, his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to team up to fight “an invasion” of illegal immigrants. He cast the nation’s estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally as the driving factor behind crime, gang violence and drug trafficking – assertions not supported by government statistics – and accused immigrants of draining U.S. government resources and depriving citizens of jobs.

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.

Before this year, ATF had played almost no role in immigration enforcement. It typically investigated firearms offenses, bombings, arson and illicit shipments of alcohol and tobacco.

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.

The DEA, whose roughly 10,000 staff have led the nation’s efforts to battle drug cartels, has shifted about a quarter of its work to immigration operations, said a former official briefed by current DEA leaders on the changes. Two other former officials described the commitment as “substantial” but did not know precisely how much work shifted.

>>1394640
Great so instead of you know, going after actual criminals, we're directing all our resources to deported undocumented people who side jobs to keep themselves afloat.

You'd think the actual criminals actively harming the population would be the greater priority but no, gotta keep those numbers up.

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 ATF and the State Department acknowledged in a statement they are helping with immigration enforcement, but declined to elaborate on specific staffing decisions.

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.

The White House has said it is acting within the limits of the Constitution and that it was protecting the safety and jobs of U.S. citizens.

The results, so far, are mixed: the number of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border in February was the lowest in decades and the number of people detained over immigration violations has surged. That hasn’t yet led to an increase in deportations, but experts expect a jump in those numbers in coming months.

“STOP AND FRISK”
The focus on immigration is drawing significant resources away from other crime-fighting departments, according to the more than 20 sources who spoke to Reuters.

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.

That’s changing.

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.

Over the past two years, those HSI agents have helped more than 3,000 child victims, often after complex probes, DHS data shows. “There’s a good argument that these changes will lead to some child victims continuing to be exploited,” said Allen.

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.

But on January 31, HSI staff received an internal email from a top official with a new mission of “protecting the American people against invasion.”

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.

Recently, HSI has been offering training to employees unfamiliar with immigration enforcement. This includes how to lure immigrants out of their homes for interrogation in so-called “knock and talk” visits, conduct stop and frisk operations, or carry out warrantless arrests, according to previously unreported internal documents shared with Reuters.

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.
IRS special agents are usually “out there following complex money trails; they break up drug deals, and they make people pay the taxes they owe,” said Elaine Maag, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank that studies tax issues. “There are direct and indirect costs to pulling IRS criminal investigators out of the field.”
The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

PROSECUTION WORK PILING UP
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.
In the memo, Bove called for increasing the number of immigration prosecutions, and said any cases that are declined must be urgently reported to the Justice Department.

As a result, federal prosecutors, who typically handle a variety of crimes, have been inundated with immigration cases, two of the sources said.

In San Diego, the number of people charged in federal court in February with felony immigration crimes more than quadrupled compared to the previous year, a Reuters examination of federal court records found. The number of people charged with felony drug crimes dropped slightly over the same period.

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.
Case management records from the Justice Department show that fewer than 1% of cases brought to prosecutors by the DEA and ATF over the past decade involved allegations that someone had violated an immigration law.

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.
Sometimes prosecutors rejected those cases because of problems with the evidence, they said. Now, if immigration authorities determine that the people were in the country illegally at the time of that case, agents are being dispatched to arrest them, the people 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.

>>1394644
Its good news... for pedophiles.
Trump really likes enabling child fucking and people that enable child fuckers apparently.

>>1394640
most illegals rape kids

>>1394655
No, that's Republican priests.

>>1394655
Most illegals don’t do any crime, because if they get caught they’ll get deported.

Epstein's buddy tRump don't put a high priority on stopping the sexual abuse of kids. tRump, charity stole 40m(in today's $) from the kids charity.

>>1394640
Trump protecting his child rapist friends again

>>1394680
>illegals
>don’t do crime
>illegal
>”not a crime”

>>1394717
OTHER crime

>>1394680
>Most illegals don’t do any crime,
>illegals
Nigga do you realize what you just fucking said!?!

>>1394720
A crime is a crime, especially not respecting our borders and sovereignty. They can continue being a goody-two-shoes in their own goddamn countries.

What makes you think that breaking major laws is a preventive quality in regards to other crimes?

>>1394723
i mean, if they're gonna bother sneaking in here in the first place, presumably they don't want to get thrown out, so naturally to achieve that they'd need to avoid law enforcement getting involved and investigating them. now, if it's a gang member or someone like that coming in to smuggle stuff then it's one thing, but someone who's just trying to leave mexico because they're pursuing a higher standard of living has incentive to avoid performing more crimes while they're here, especially violent or drug related ones that are associated with gang activity

>>1394725
If they’re gonna bother sneaking in here in the first place, that means they don’t respect our laws you moron.
A higher standard of living and being in white countries is not a human right. There are plenty and plenty of Americans who need a higher standard of living that actually do follow the law- we do NOT need to take care of the rest of the world.

Your presumptions are fomented from years and years of liberal propaganda, so I can see how it’s hard for you- if you care so deeply about these Mexicans you should go to Mexico and help them, without spending the money footed by actual taxpayers.

>>1394725
>them breaking the law to get here means they'll respect our laws
LMAO what a fucking retard.

>>1394726
>>1394725
Of which plenty of money is footed.
Every single person that comes over that border illegally is an loss in opportunities for American dollars to actually help disaffected Americans.

>>1394728
A loss *

>>1394726
They have a lower rate of crime retard. And stop diverting resources used to stop actual harm.

>>1394726
why would they bother drawing attention to themselves by committing crime? do you think they want to get deported? i can see at most drug smuggling but even then that's be monopolized by the cartels because anyone coming from there is not gonna meddle in their business

>>1394730
>They have a lower rate of crime retard.
>doesn't even know how many are in the country
>doesn't count illegally entering as a crime to begin with
>They have a lower rate of crime retard.
Oh I would love to see what far-left .org website you pulled that out of your ass from.

>>1394734
i mean you can go on google and it's literally the entire front page
putting aside that "crime" in this instance obviously refers to other types of crime (which these studies are referring to in the first place, by the way), if anything the crime rate should seem higher because they should be harder to detect unless they committed a crime or otherwise made themselves known to law enforcement for documentation

>>1394736
>just google it
lol that's what I thought. Opinion disregarded.

>>1394730
>>1394732
>lower rate of crime
They are all committing crimes being here illegally
>uhhh I meant violent crimes
Do you know how many violent crimes go unsolved in the US?
There would be no way to tell who commits such crime if no one is apprehended.
You have no idea what the actually crime rates are for illegals (100% btw) because they actively hide from and avoid law enforcement.
Drug smuggling is the least of it. These tons of sex trafficking that made it here to the US from this insane open-border policy, possibly the worst in our nations history. there is absolutely no benefit in letting people come in Willy-nilly, ESPECIALLY when it completely lacks oversight- ontop of the government telling its people that they’re wrong for not wanting any part of it. It was and is a cruelty to the American people and the heroes that established and maintained this country. Such policies were quite literally a spit in the face to the American people, if not an outright assault on our sovereignty and future.

>>1394740
>But they COULD BE committing crimes!
So could you lol.

>>1394736
Our governments job is to protect Americans, not Mexicans. Certainly not ones who blatantly disregard our laws. You’ll find plenty of naturalized Mexicans here in Texas who take the same position.
I pray you come to these illegal bean towns in Texas one day, so you can see how royally you fucked us in such short time.
The only people capable of fucking us that are absolute imbeciles or completely malicious,

>>1394742
They ARE committing crimes you fuckwit
And our government’s policy should not be
1) continue to allow it
2) gaslight taxpayers
3) fund social services for illegals
4) piss down my back and tell me it’s raining
Again, the only people who would let this happen are either unfathomably stupid or harbor malicious intent against the American people.

>>1394742
They're called illegals retard. Why do you think that is?

>>1394744
Stop diverting resources meant for catching serial killers and rapists towards catching the dude who works 18 hours to day picking fruit.

>>1394740
>>1394744
The level of psychological hatred you have is so vastly disproportionate to the impact illegals actually have on your life or actual severity of crime is genuinely unhealthy. Get help.

>>1394750
Categorizing it as hate is becoming oldhat.
Having standards and laws isn't hate.
They are breaking the law.
They need to be held accountable.

>>1394751
This is the equivalent to calling for a hand to be chopped off for basic shoplifting. The fact you can't recognize this is hatred is a sign you are deeply disturbed and REALLY in need of help.

>>1394752
I would gladly chop off the hand of every retard who insists human trafficking and endangering American citizens is a good thing.

>>1394752
>if you hate criminals you're deeply disturbed!
This is what it's like to be a democrat. Just -

>>1394757
but we hate the felon currently in office

You freaks are so obsessed with illegal immigration that you consider them existing to be as severe a crime as fucking child molestation.

>>1394763
illegals are doing a large percentage of the child molestation.

>>1394768
No, they're not.

>>1394659
nope, its democrats
>>1394680
100% of illegals are by definition criminals. also illegals rape, rob and assault other illegals all the time. it just goes unreported and under reported because the raped illegals don't want to get deported like 80% of illegals are rapists and or child rapists

>>1394763
illegal aliens are as evil as child molesters and are usually also child molesters. they should be castrated and then deported
>>1394768
this

>>1394748
Wouldn’t have to if those people weren’t let in by the tens of millions. Every one of those people who crossed illegally was a loss of opportunity for American dollars to actually help disaffected Americans. And you’re promoting it lol

>>1394750
You should go to Mexico, you have full free range to access all the goddamned Mexicans you want, stop dragging us down with you

>>1394774
>things that aren't reported or recorded happen all the time in my schizo brain, and you need to entertain my delusions because I was tricked into voting for an orange retard

>>1394640
less unauthorized birthright citizens
less sexual predators
less kids being harmed win win
now if they could just go after the pride sex offenders hosting children storytelling events

>>1394795
illegals are rapists
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/central-america-migrants-rape_n_5806972

>>1394809
So they're raped on their way here but not here? Sounds a lot like we're the safer country.

>>1394825
Sounds like the people they’re traveling with are a bunch of rapists

>>1394763
>You freaks are so obsessed with illegal immigration
From the blue-haired trans-freak that is so upset our laws are being enforced for once.
>that you consider them existing to be as severe a crime as fucking child molestation.
Nice try, but no we consider them existing INSIDE the country illegally to be a crime - not them existing OUTSIDE.

>>1394769
>No, they're not.
>>1394825
>it happened outside our country so it doesn't count
ROFLMFAO

>>1394911
1. There aren't even from the same chain
2. You realize even your own statistics cite the sexual assaults happening in transit right? Meaning they aren't the people coming over but instead people in the countries they're crossing through who are responsible?

>>1394640
Why does it take 5 people to write 1 article?

>>1394912
1) who gives a fuck? You're the only faggot whining about this shit pretending they aren't criminals. Nobody is fooled.
2) And 80% of the rapes happen in Mexico, which is all the more reason why we should shut the border down completely and stop letting people through.

Cry more bitch.

>>1394915
>You're the only faggot whining about this shit pretending they aren't criminals
They aren't criminals you retard. No criminal record in either country (not even illegal immigration since the ones that have lawyers applied for asylum legitimately), no evidence of gang affiliation that isn't flimsy or circumstantial (tattoos that literally have nothing to do with gangs at all being cited as proof), and they never actually had a trial to determine that.

Oh, and by the way, per your own statistics those immigrants aren't even majority Mexican.

>>1394910
>From the blue-haired trans-freak
Do you check under your bed for trannies every night?
>Nice try, but no we consider them existing INSIDE the country illegally to be a crime
...yes, anon, that is indeed what illegal immigrant means. Very good.

>>1394915
That's me, fag. Let your mind explode at the possibility of there being more than one person who thinks you're a fucking cunt.

>>1394919
>They aren't criminals you retard.
Then why are they called illegals? Oh right, because they're breaking the law just to get here, faggot. stfu

>Oh, and by the way, per your own statistics those immigrants aren't even majority Mexican.
Did I say that, faggot? I said 80% of the rapes happen in Mexico. All the more reason to shut down the Mexican border and keep rapists out.

>>1394921
>Do you check under your bed for trannies every night?
I'm sorry you were giving such faggot vibes I'm assuming you're the kind of retard who dyes your hair and lives in Portland.
>...yes, anon, that is indeed what illegal immigrant means. Very good.
So we agree they're criminals then, yes?

>That's me, fag. Let your mind explode at the possibility of there being more than one person who thinks you're a fucking cunt.
Oh great, multiple incorrect cocksuckers whining about muh illegals, giving the same retarded bullshit takes.

>>1394923
>Then why are they called illegals?
They aren't illegals though. At least the soccer player was a legal asylum seeker.

>>1394924
Oh you mean the one from the last thread with gang tattoos and flashing gang signs? He a gud boi he dindu nuffin!

>>1394923
>I'm sorry you were giving such faggot vibes I'm assuming you're the kind of retard who dyes your hair and lives in Portland.
From that one sentence?
No, seriously, do you actually check under your bed for these people? Seems you see them everywhere.
>So we agree they're criminals then, yes?
That illegal immigrants are criminals? Yeah, retard, no shit, that's what words mean. And my argument is that child abuse is a much, MUCH bigger deal than illegal immigrants and diverting resources from the former to the latter is fucking batshit retarded.

>>1394926
>From that one sentence?
Yup. That's how much of a faggit you are.

>That illegal immigrants are criminals? Yeah, retard, no shit, that's what words mean.
Okay great, you mind telling your boyfriend ITT that? He keeps whining about how they're not criminals.

>And my argument is that child abuse is a much, MUCH bigger deal than illegal immigrants
Except that a much, MUCH bigger chuck of child abuse comes from these illegals.
>in before nuh uh!!!
So kicking them the fuck out helps reduce our crime rates - including kid raping - and pisses off the dems who support that shit. Win win.

>>1394925
The dude doing the rock and roll gesture with a tattoo of a soccer ball on his arm? The one who literally got released from maximum security and was supposed to have a hearing because his lawyer pointed that out? That guy?

>>1394927
>Except that a much, MUCH bigger chuck of child abuse comes from these illegals.
No, it doesn't.
>So kicking them the fuck out helps reduce our crime rates - including kid raping - and pisses off the dems who support that shit. Win win.
That doesn't refute that, you fucking idiot. How did you preempt that response and still fuck that up?

>>1394929
>No, it doesn't.
Like I said, in before nuh uh!!!
>That doesn't refute that, you fucking idiot.
Yeah tell me more how crime doesn't go down as we're throwing out criminals.

>>1394930
>Like I said, in before nuh uh!!!
That doesn't make that not true, you fucking child. A much, MUCH bigger chuck of child abuse does not come from these illegals.

>>1394932
Anon he's literally reduced his argument down to "nuh uh". He's a bot.