A quarter of FBI agents are assigned to immigration enforcement, per FBI data
Nearly a quarter of the FBI’s roughly 13,000 agents across the country are currently assigned to immigration enforcement, with the number climbing to upward of 40% in the nation’s largest field offices, according to data from the FBI obtained by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and shared with The Washington Post.
The large number of reassignments — about 3,000 agents — reflect a vast reshaping of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, which has focused on national security threats since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The intense focus on immigration has raised alarm among current and former FBI agents who say morale is low across the bureau as agents have less time to dedicate to the often complex cases they were hired to work on.
In the past, few FBI agents have been assigned to work on immigration enforcement alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though the two agencies will collaborate on investigations.
The Trump administration has long said that more of the FBI’s time is going into immigration enforcement, but the figure of almost 25% is the first precise recording of how big the shift has been. Warner requested the data in his role as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Agents have been pulled from duties related to cybercrimes, drug trafficking, terrorism, counterintelligence and more, the statistics show. Agents assigned to immigration enforcement are working with ICE to locate and arrest people in the country illegally.
The total amount of FBI resources devoted to immigration is probably higher than even the 25% figure. The FBI reassignment data Warner obtained reflects the number of agents working on immigration at least 50% of their time. It does not account for scores of other agents who have been detailed to immigration enforcement a lesser portion of their time.
FBI Director Kash Patel has also diverted more FBI agents to focus on combating local violent crime, another priority of the Trump administration. Patel has publicly said that, under his leadership, the FBI has so far made more counterintelligence- and drug-trafficking-related arrests than occurred during the same period last year.
But multiple people interviewed said agents are stretched thin, which could risk causing national security investigations and other complex matters to fall through the cracks.
“We are weakening ourselves day by day,” said Chris O’Leary, a former FBI senior executive and special agent. “Having agents walk the beat and conduct immigration arrests is really a misuse of exquisite ability.”
The immigration reassignments are one lever in the administration’s remaking of the FBI. Patel has pushed out the bureau’s most senior leaders and fired agents who he feels would have been disloyal to the president’s agenda. Multiple people interviewed, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that agents fear they can be fired for doing their jobs and that many of those eligible for retirement are fleeing the bureau.
On Tuesday, Patel fired three agents who were allegedly involved in obtaining phone records during the Biden administration of nine Republican lawmakers as part of an investigation into Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
Republican lawmakers said this week they discovered that the FBI had obtained their phone records and described that as an act of betrayal. The phone records were obtained through the grand jury process. The records obtained only showed the numbers that the lawmakers called and the duration of those calls, not the content of their calls or messages. There is no evidence that the lawmakers were subjects of the investigation.
FBI agents are assigned to cases by their supervisors and generally do not choose the cases they work on.
“You’re darn right I fired those agents,” Patel said Tuesday evening on Fox News. “We’re just warming up. We are running our investigations to the ground. We’re finding every single person involved.”
FBI agents have also been dispatched to assist Trump’s call-up of the National Guard and other federal resources to combat crime in Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Washington. Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to protect ICE facilities amid what she described as an increase in threats and attacks on the properties. She specifically called for agents to be deployed in Portland and Chicago.
In August, the FBI began dispatching more than 100 FBI agents to work each night in D.C. as part of a surge in federal law enforcement officers mandated by Trump to combat local crime in the nation’s capital. Hundreds of agents from the bureau’s Washington field office — including those working in counterterrorism, cyber and public corruption sections — have been working overnight shifts multiple times a week to meet the demands, according to people familiar with the plan.
The people interviewed said that has hamstrung the Washington office, which is generally seen as an elite section of the FBI, and has led to a slowdown in other cases.
“As the FBI Washington Field Office participates in the federal law enforcement surge to crush violent crime in Washington, D.C., WFO agents, analysts, and other personnel continue to maintain the office’s high operational tempo to protect the National Capital Region from national security and criminal threats,” a spokesperson for the Washington field office said in a statement last month.
Bondi defended the FBI’s decision to deploy more resources toward immigration enforcement during a Senate oversight hearing Tuesday, saying that the focus is necessary to keep the country safe.
“Every day our FBI, [Drug Enforcement Administration], [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] agents, and now U.S. marshals working on a task force with Homeland Security are out there keeping Americans safe and getting illegal aliens out of our country, many of whom have committed violent crimes in this country,” Bondi said.