https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/fbi-agents-reassigned-ice-immigrationNearly 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 counter-terrorism have been diverted.”Gray, however, said he was not concerned about a temporary shift while homeland security 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 the depart,ent on “keeping Americans safe and getting illegal aliens out of our country”.
Obviously more productive than manufacturing "white domestic terrorism" plots to entrap citizens with.
>>1446515cool /pol/ meme
>>1446517I've been following the Governor Whitmire 'kidnapping' trials, and I think it's way past time that my tax dollars stop funding this bullshit.
>>1446521https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_plot#FBI_informants_and_agentsWhat's the problem?
its a golden time to be a serial killer
>>1446528>its a golden time to be a serial killerNot really. Serial Killers rarely become the FBI's problem.
>>1446522Well you see, it isn't fair that one of their undercover agents suggested "hey what if we kidnapped the governor?" and this group of retards immediately agreed and made plans to do it.
>>1446544Source on the claim that the FBI first suggested it?
>>1446545Oh yeah that reminds me; literally all they did was offer suggestions to a plan they were already making to see if they were serious. Which they were; cue arrest.
>>1446548From the wikipedia article it seems like they already had a "hunting liberals" app up and running long before that happened.
The FBI should have been shut down when they were all kneeling for fentanyl Floyd. That tells you everything you need to know how corrupt that agency is. It's a miracle Trump is bulldozing it
>>1446511Shut down the fbi. It’s unconstitutional.
>>1446522>What's the problem?Not that I expect you commiefaggots to care about the facts, but the FBI dressing up in camo and driving people around for a camping trip only to get lost on the road trying to find the governor's vacation home but failing to because they were given the wrong address only to subsequently claim the guys in the van with them were stalking the governor is not the kind of 'police work' I should have to pay for.It's just a long history of severe fuck ups from the FBI. It's not like anybody thinks J Edgar Hoover was a good guy, and nothing has changed since. Ruby ridge and Waco is how a lot of the leadership made their career. Fucking up isn't punished; it's rewarded.
>>1446583Not what happened retard.
>>1446584>After becoming an informant, Chappel became the group's "XO", or executive officer, the second-highest rank in the group,[110] and then its highest-ranked officer after Morrison departed the group due to marital problems.[110] Chappel taught the group tactical skills he had learned in the U.S. Army,[110] offered the group use of a credit card (paid for by the FBI) to buy ammunition and supplies,Paid for, planned and executed by paid FBI employees. Six people charged but only two convictions, and those are going to get overturned as well. They had more FBI agents in the group than they did actual members.If the FBI is in charge of the group, what exactly prevents them for being charged with kidnapping conspiracy? I'm fuzzy on that one.
>>1446593Yeah no. They made the plan, FBI just said "hey we'll let buy guns for you guys to see if the plan is serious" and they fell for it hook line and sinker. The two that got convicted are never getting overturned and their appeal failed.
>>1446560Where do you people get this shit from?
>>1446716 >>1446571>>1446560Some people have a hard time critical thinking because hurts their fee fees or they are very lazy.They probably saw a heavily compressed JPG of a tweet claiming "they saw a guy at the fbi who was woke" and never could be arsed to look into it any further and now its a fact in their mind. Combine that with the "they are all against me" mentality and poof, you have cognitive dissonance.
>>1446511Nothing says “keeping our nation safe” like taking the guys who handle terrorists, serial killers, drug traffickers, and foreign spies and instead tasking them on Home Depot staff that didn’t file their paperwork right. Or just brown people when they can’t find enough of those. Christ. How much is this is malice and how much is incompetence?
>>1446716>Where do you people get this shit from?Their ideology is a constantly morphing, reality defying beast. Whenever Trump says or do something they instinctually scramble to invent some sort of justification. That's why you can never pin them down on some concrete set of ideals or facts. If he comes out tomorrow and says actually the FBI is based and it needs to triple in size they'll just concoct some new theory about how it was actually Democrats that tried to destroy the FBI and Trump is saving it. When reality doesn't agree with Trump they just invent a new one. You're witnessing mass psychosis on a scale never recorded in human history.
>>1446974You mean the people dressed as civilians on Jan 6 and inviting riots and the people kneeling for fentanyl floyd?
>>1446985>You mean the people dressed as civilians on Jan 6You do not live on planet earth
>>1446515>muh entrapment If you're stupid enough to fall into that crap you deserve it.
>>1446992If you think it's a good way to spend money, you can volunteer your own, faggot.
>>1447013Monitoring far right domestic terrorists is a good way to spend money though.
>>1447014So pay for it yourself rather than taxing those individuals to monitor and entrap themselves.
>>1447017No one was entrapped. That's a /pol/ meme.
>>1447018The FBI has been entrapping law abiding citizens for 30+ years now.It's gone on for long enough. That statement doesn't have anything to do with political affiliation. Disband the FBI.
>>1447020Sure chuddie, everyone believes you.
>>1447036Randy Weaver died of natural causes in 2022 after being acquitted of all the charges except a process crime of failure to appear, which they gave him 18 months for. Never convicted of any crime, but the FBI murdered his wife and son. The FBI agent who shot his unarmed wife holding their infant son was never charged with a crime, and in fact personally subsequently participated in the Waco siege in which he shot more innocent people, for which he was never charged.These are the people you hold in such high regard, faggot. Hoover used to suck dick and wear dresses. I assume that's why you support them.
>>1447040ffs that happened 35 years ago
>>1446511To be fair, those terrorists are 5,000 miles away across an ocean and the browns are here in our own country. The domestic threat far outweighs the overseas threat.Get rid of every last brownoid and we're golden.
>>1447050And it can happen again.
>>1447098J. Edgar Hoover would sooner get resurrected and start surveilling the Trump family.
>>1447106I'm sure Hoover would love to get some dirt on Trump the same way he got it on Nixon, for the purposes of blackmailing the elected president for the benefit of the unelected fourth branch of government.Nixon was going to disband the FBI until he had a private meeting with Hoover, after which he appointed Hoover for life. That's how the FBI does business, and always has since it was founded. Pure corruption.
