Nearly half of FBI agents working in major U.S. field offices have been reassigned to assist in immigration enforcement, according to newly released data, a striking shift in law enforcement priorities that has raised concerns about public safety.
Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with The Guardian, suggests that the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all FBI offices, 23% of the bureau’s roughly 13,000 total agents are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
Warner’s office said FBI agents now deployed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have been removed from their work combating cybercrime, drug trafficking, terrorism, espionage, violent crimes, counterintelligence and other efforts that are part of the office’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 targets in an effort to support Trump’s increasingly aggressive immigration raids, with the administration targeting 3,000 arrests daily and seeking to expand its detention capacity to detain more than 100,000 immigrants.
The data understates the scale of the shakeup, as the FBI only provided counts of agents who now spend more than half of their work enforcing immigration law, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now devoted to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of agents had been redirected to DHS.
“When a quarter of the FBI’s top agents are removed from the front lines of fighting terrorists, spies, drug traffickers and violent criminals, the consequences are clear: critical national security work is sidelined and our country is at greater risk,” Warner said in a statement.
The FBI’s transformation 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 so 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 would likely oppose the redirection, he said: “Part of the reason FBI leadership would be doing this on such a 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 deemed disloyal to Trump, German said, highlighting reports of the firing of staff involved in the Jan. 6 investigation.
FBI agents, he said, are generally trained as investigators who can make targeted arrests, a job that differs significantly from that of many immigration agents, which could lead to problems in the field during immigration raids. “Just getting into a van with a group of armed men and rolling through the streets until you see someone running away is inherently a more dangerous type of activity that they’re not very well trained for,” German said.
There has been extensive documentation of the violent and indiscriminate nature of Ice’s raids, which have often been carried out by masked men and have sometimes led to the arrest of American citizens, and adding FBI personnel to the mix could exacerbate the chaos and potential for abuse, 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 Thursday.
German, an FBI whistleblower who has spoken out about civil rights abuses committed by the bureau’s intelligence work, said he was most concerned about the agency moving away from public corruption and white-collar crime, crimes that state and local agencies have no capacity to address: “That’s where the real damage will come.”
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Current and former FBI agents told the Washington Post that there was growing concern about low morale within the agency and that agents were overstretched, which could hamper national security investigations and complex cases.
Kenneth Gray, a former FBI agent and professor of practice in the criminal justice department at the University of New Haven, said the shift in priorities resembled the FBI’s post-9/11 reorganization, when counterterrorism became a central focus.
“The office can withstand a temporary change in its priorities, but in the long term, if agents continue to work on immigration matters, rather than counterterrorism, foreign counterintelligence or cybercrime, that can end up affecting us a lot,” said Gray, who worked at the office for 24 years, before leaving in 2012. “The next 9/11 could happen if agents who were working on counterterrorism have been diverted.”
Gray, however, said he was not concerned about a temporary change while DHS conducts a rapid recruitment of new Ice officers.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi defended the redirection of FBI resources toward immigration enforcement in a tense Senate hearing earlier this week, as Democrats accused her of weaponizing the Justice Department. FBI agents, he said, worked daily with DHS to “keep Americans safe and remove illegal aliens from our country.”