Ari Espay/Zuma
President Donald Trump’s deportation army is growing by the day, and a shocking number of its foot soldiers don’t even work for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The vast majority, in fact, come from other law enforcement agencies.
In January, the Trump administration started deputizing Justice Department officers to work for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which focuses on mass deportations. (A second ICE division, Homeland Security Investigations, investigates child exploitation and weapons trafficking, among other transnational crimes.) ERO recruits from other sources, too, including HSI and local police departments. According to ICE’s website, ERO has more than 6,100 deportation officers. But as of August, per the Cato Institute, it was receiving support from about 42,000 non-ERO personnel, including roughly 28,000 federal officials and more than 13,000 state and local ones.
Put another way: Only about 13 percent of the personnel carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda are employed by ICE’s primary deportation unit; the rest are pulled from other jobs, primarily crime-fighting jobs. The administration “is deprioritizing all other types of criminal law enforcement,” says the Cato Institute’s David Bier, who tracked down this data from ICE.
At some federal agencies, a huge chunk of the workforce has been diverted. Case in point: About 1,500 personnel from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were helping ERO in August. That’s more than 1 in 4 of ATF’s staff. Meanwhile, ICE told the Cato Institute that more than 12,000 HSI personnel were helping ERO—which is more than the total staff listed on HSI’s website. (ICE did not respond to my request for clarification.)
With so many officers on the immigration beat, what isn’t getting done? Cato’s Bier noted that ERO recruited FBI agents who would normally be investigating terrorism or doing counterintelligence work; in June, after a terrorist attack, ERO sent some of them back to their normal jobs, “effectively admitting,” Bier wrote, that immigration enforcement “had compromised national security.”
Outside the federal government, ICE is recruiting municipal police officers and sheriffs’ deputies at a fast clip—even offering to pay their salaries and hand out bonuses to departments that round up a high percentage of the undocumented immigrants ICE has tipped them off about. Many of those officers would otherwise be out policing communities and presumably investigating murders, rapes, and assaults.
For an administration that has been sending military troops into cities in the name of thwarting violent crime, diverting local crime-fighters for civil enforcement duties seems a curious choice. “Obviously there’s another agenda here that is not based on public safety,” Bier says.