Nearly Half Of FBI Agents In Large Field Offices Have Been Put On ICE

from the get-your-federal-crime-on! dept

As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there’s only one crime worth targeting: not being white.

Despite ICE now being the best-funded federal law enforcement agency and military troops being scrambled to any area of the country that pisses Trump off, ICE is no closer to reaching White House advisor Stephen Miller’s baseline target of 3,000 arrests per day than it was the day after Trump’s second inauguration.

Since this seems to be the only thing Trump consistently cares about (give or take his antipathy towards renewable resources, “transgender for everyone,” and whatever the fuck “woke” is), every federal law enforcement agency is starving itself of resources in hopes of turning this administration’s fascist, bigoted fantasies into reality.

The DHS — under puppy-killing Bratz doll Kristi Noem — has already done its part, shifting pretty much the entirety of its investigative wing into support roles for ICE operations. This happened despite the GOP being collectively (and vocally) convinced anyone straying from binary gender roles is nothing more than a child molester. HSI used to hunt down child predators. Now, it’s decided to throw kids to the wolves while it targets day laborers without criminal records. (Or maybe it just got tired of arresting Republicans and evangelical religious leaders on the regular for their crimes against children.)

It’s one thing for the DHS to do stupid stuff with its own talent. It’s quite another when it begins bleeding into other federal agencies and infecting them with the same “get the brown people” energy that’s made DHS and ICE the repugnant agencies they are.

There’s never been a better time to engage in federal crimes, as The Guardian reports.

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.

If nothing else, it will probably please Charlie Kirk’s widow to know the FBI is being flown at half-staff. Throwing this manpower at immigration enforcement doesn’t seem to be budging the arrests-per-day needle much. Meanwhile, other criminal investigations are being under-served, which says something much nastier about an already-nasty administration: it doesn’t care about crime; it only cares about rounding up non-white people and removing them from the country.

The only upside given this influx of FBI agents, ATF officers, and DEA personnel is that fewer people are getting caught up in federal law enforcement entrapment schemes (stash house stings, radicalizing people into terrorism arrests, etc.). On the other hand, people who’ve done nothing more than engage in civil violations are being subjected to the combined force of multiple federal law enforcement agencies who have been encouraged — if not explicitly instructed — to engage in biased policing.

And it’s probably even worse than it immediately appears, what with the government’s general unwillingness to be completely honest about its form and functions. Senator Warner says this is probably an under-count:

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.

The FBI isn’t an anomaly. It’s just another symptom of this administration’s anti-immigrant sickness. The administration pretends this massive surge of immigration enforcement is essential to the nation’s security. And it says this while rerouting actual national security personnel to DHS support roles, compromising what little is left of this nation’s security forces:

The US Department of Homeland Security has shifted hundreds of national security specialists, including cyber personnel, into jobs that support President Donald Trump’s deportations and said it would dismiss anyone who refuses to go along, according to current and former DHS employees.

[…]

Refusing a new role would be considered grounds for termination, according to two copies of letters from DHS human resources seen by Bloomberg News. Mandatory job changes often include disruptive geographic relocations and give affected workers a one-week deadline to either accept or resign, employees said.

A lot is said about the banality of evil and its contribution to authoritarianism. But not enough is said about this administration’s absolute contempt for pretty much anyone who actually works for the federal government. The DOGE purges were never enough. This administration is so banally evil it considers even raising concerns about unemployment or unexpected upheavals of employees’ lives as acts of disloyalty.

Even the most callous of corporations tend to throw a few incentives towards people being laid off and/or expected to immediately relocate (severance packages, relocation assistance). But this government considers anyone outside of Trump’s immediate circle to be acceptable collateral damage, pompously assuming there are millions of similarly qualified people just dying to work for a madman with access to nearly unlimited power.

But beyond the obvious and deliberate disregard for anyone unwilling to toe the line at a moment’s notice is the brain bleed this sort of action initiates. Talent will be leaving, either because they can’t survive the mandatory disruption of their lives or because they’re now being forced into becoming part of an effort that only serves Trump’s basest urges, rather than the good of the nation.

Filed Under: dhs, fbi, ice, mass deportation, trump administration