The Federal Bureau of Investigation multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration, The Intercept has found.
There were 279 FBI personnel working on “immigration-related matters” before Trump took office in January 2025, according to bureau records The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500.
In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total of 38,000 FBI employees.
“That is a huge, huge number of people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has testified before Congress on the cost of mass deportations. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.”
The flood of FBI personnel into immigration work came in the early days of the tenure of Director Kash Patel, who has shown a willingness to follow Trump’s orders without question or exception. According to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the redirection may have hampered the FBI’s ability to perform criminal investigative work.
“We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement.”
**“**That’s a striking diversion of resources away from public safety,” Bier said. “We’re talking about the FBI diverting people away from criminal investigations and ongoing criminal activity and into civil immigration enforcement. This is showing the extent to which the resources of the FBI were put at the disposal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contrary to the intent of Congress, and the abuse of the funds that Congress grants the FBI to accomplish its mission.”
The documents The Intercept received did not make clear if the employees assigned to immigration were part of the FBI’s total workforce or its smaller subset of 13,700 special agents. In September, the Cato Institute published a disclosure from ICE reporting that 2,840 out of 13,700 FBI special agents — 1 in 5 — were being redirected to work on ICE enforcement and removal operations.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28086819-fbi-immigration
The FBI did not respond to follow-up questions about the rapid growth in the number of personnel diverted to immigration work or whether the number included only special agents or staff from other divisions of the agency. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
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Trump has diverted thousands of agents at a number of federal agencies — including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to aid in his administration’s deportation machine.
The shift started as soon as he returned to office. By January 26, 2025, just six days after Trump’s second inauguration, the FBI had 1,390 employees working on immigration. In the first months of Trump’s second term, he ramped up arrests of immigrants around the country and authorized federal law enforcement at agencies that don’t work on immigration to help his administration carry out its deportation policies.
The FBI reassignments exploded the following month. As the Trump administration issued a directive to allow law enforcement to enter the homes of people it claimed were suspected gang members without a warrant, the number of FBI personnel working on immigration rose to 2,941.
September’s 6,500-employee number wasn’t even the peak. The number continued increasing throughout the spring and reached over 5,700 in May, when the administration set a new quota to arrest 3,000 people a day.
Another shocking detail, Bier said, was that the number of FBI agents being diverted to immigration work remained high even after Congress passed July’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which directed an additional $170 billion in funding for immigration and border spending.
“They’re going ahead with using criminal law enforcement for mass deportation purposes.”
The law “infused tens of billions of dollars” for immigration enforcement,” Bier said, ” — “and yet there’s no let-up.”
“This is not about ‘ICE doesn’t have the money,’” Bier said. “ICE has the money, and they’re going ahead with using criminal law enforcement for mass deportation purposes.”
It’s not clear what the FBI’s “immigration-related” work entails, but the rapid expansion suggests FBI staff are working on issues unrelated to the FBI’s mandate, Reichlin-Melnick added.
“If you look at how quickly the scale of this ramped up and compare it to what we know was happening at the time, it’s very clear that a lot of this — probably the significant majority — was immigration enforcement,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
The increase coincides with an increase in FBI presence at immigration raids. On Wednesday, FBI agents were among the federal law enforcement personnel carrying out raids in Minnesota related to the right-wing allegations of fraud against the Somali immigrant community.
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The number of FBI personnel working on immigration also raises national security concerns, Reichlin-Melnick added. The FBI had to reassign agents to work on counterterrorism, after previously diverting them to work on immigration, following the U.S. bombing of Iran last summer.
“The national security implications of this are likely significant. In September 2025, 6,500 FBI personnel were working at least an hour of their day on immigration-related matters,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There is no situation in which the administration has made the security of the nation better by reassigning these agents.”
Bier agreed the diversion was potentially dangerous, pointing to the risks brought on by the current U.S. war on Iran.
“Anytime you’re involved in a war — and we certainly are — you should be careful about retaliation and monitoring those threats,” Bier said. “It makes little sense to divert people away from that during this time, especially.”
The post FBI Redirected Thousands of Workers to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push appeared first on The Intercept.
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