Trump’s deportation drive pulls federal agents from major crimes work

Thousands of federal agents are being pulled away from child abuse, money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism, sexual abuse and fraud investigations and pushed into immigration enforcement, a rearrangement that has become one of the biggest overhauls of federal law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The Department of Homeland Security has not given a full accounting of how many agents were reassigned, but the scale of the shift has already altered how the agency works, whom it rewards and which crimes get attention.

President Donald Trump built the campaign around his promise to deport “millions and millions” of “criminal aliens,” and the White House has said it was aiming to remove about 1 million immigrants from the United States this year. DHS says the goal is to mobilize federal and state law enforcement to find, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former Homeland Security official, said she did not recall seeing federal resources so broadly turned toward immigration enforcement. Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin called the campaign a “wasteful, misguided diversion of resources” that makes the country less safe.

The money behind the drive is just as significant as the personnel shift. On July 4, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave the department $165 billion, including $46.5 billion for border wall construction, $14.4 billion for removal transportation, $4.1 billion to hire additional U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel and $3.2 billion for new technology. She said the law also provided $2.7 billion for surveillance, $10,000 bonuses for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents over four years, and funding for ICE to hire 10,000 new agents and expand detention capacity to an average daily population of 100,000 detainees with 80,000 new beds.

The crackdown has also changed tactics. The Marshall Project reported that DHS has leaned more heavily on 287(g) agreements with local police as it tries to reduce the public spectacle of raids, especially after backlash tied to deaths of U.S. citizens during enforcement operations in Minneapolis. DHS said participating agencies could be reimbursed for officers’ salaries and benefits. A February report cited by The Marshall Project estimated that 13,800 to 15,800 local officers and deputies had already been trained for task-force work, more than the roughly 12,000 new ICE agents DHS says it has hired since Trump returned to office.

The political fight over the overhaul is still intensifying. House Speaker Mike Johnson has described the enforcement push as a “hiccup” and said Republicans were making a “course correction.” Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union said the public has now seen what mass detention and mass deportation mean. Rosemary Jenks of the Immigration Accountability Project has said some officials appear to be backing away from Trump’s mass-deportation promise. As Congress battles over DHS funding and GOP leaders weigh a separate immigration-enforcement plan, the department is being rebuilt around speed, detention and deportation, with major crimes teams left to absorb the consequences.