Copy Link Share Share Comment

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

As I followed a patrol of federal agents around New York City’s Chinatown during their fumbling attempted raid in mid-October last year, I noticed something curious. I was following a small group with the immediately recognizable style of Stephen Miller’s paramilitaristic vanguard: baggy street clothes, masked faces, weapons, and ballistic vests without specific insignia, just the catchall “POLICE” or “Federal Agent.” As we turned one corner, we walked past two other agents dressed much the same, except that one wore a vest that did have agency identification, and it wasn’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection; it read “IRS-CI,” for the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division.

This is not typically what IRS-CI does. The comparatively small federal law enforcement agency, like the majority of its counterparts, is specialized around one area of enforcement, in this case tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax code—complex investigations requiring particularized skills, which is why the IRS’ own job portal encourages “expertise in accounting.” It is not part of the Department of Homeland Security or even the Department of Justice, residing under the IRS in the Treasury Department.

Yet here was an IRS-CI agent on a foot patrol during a much larger operation that seemed primarily geared toward detaining random men whom agents deemed likely to be African, and she wasn’t an anomaly. As a well-placed source confirmed to me contemporaneously, the operation had hastily brought in dozens of agents from ICE, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and the IRS, potentially among other agencies. This approach itself is not now abnormal; per figures obtained and published by the Cato Institute last September, an eye-watering 28,390 federal law enforcement personnel as of August had been detailed to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the component that handles immigration arrests and detention.

........

© Slate