Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

FBI Redirected Thousands of Workers to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push

Over 9,000 FBI personnel were assigned to immigration after Trump returned to office — a massive diversion that experts warn could put national security at risk.

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.”

“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.

The FBI did not respond to follow-up questions about the rapid growth in........

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