Washington, DC — Two new stories offer a reminder that the Trump administration’s mass deportation crusade is scaling up, despite Americans’ public safety needs and priorities and in contrast to the supposed new direction under DHS Secretary Mullin.
A national Associated Press wire story by Rebecca Santana captures that while the Trump administration is “moving in many ways away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a quieter approach to enforcement … the administration insists it is not backing down from its lofty deportation goals … in a sign of its continued determination, ICE in budget documents says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and the next … The agency also has plenty of money to carry out its mission, with Congress granting the Department of Homeland Security more than $170 billion for Trump’s immigration agenda last year.”
Meanwhile, an investigative piece in The Intercept by Akela Lacy, “FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push,” reminds us that the mass deportation crusade is diverting money and manpower away from public safety and investigative priorities, including at the FBI:
“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.
… 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. ‘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.'”
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“As the mass deportation agenda continues to ramp up, the investment in public safety ramps down. The diversion of key resources to deport hard working immigrant families – billions of dollars to ICE and redeployment of thousands of FBI agents – means America is less safe. Despite the reallocated resources and the unprecedented windfall of more than $170 billion already directed to mass deportation, Republicans are now seeking to gift Stephen Miller an additional $70 billion in mass deportation funding for the rest of President Trump’s term and without any accountability and restraints.
The administration’s official goal to deport a million people quota means they are intent to go after immigrants who are deeply rooted and contributing to this nation, including those whose legal status or protections may be stripped to make them deportable. None of this is about public safety or advancing Americans’ priorities. All of it is about an administration going for broke, despite the reality that mass deportation makes us poorer, weaker and less safe.”
