https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/09/fbi-agents-reassigned-ice-immigrationNearly half of the FBI agents working in the US’s major field offices have been reassigned to aid immigration enforcement, according to newly released data, a stunning shift in law enforcement priorities that has raised public safety concerns.
Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with the Guardian, suggests the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest field offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all of the FBI’s offices, 23% of the roughly 13,000 total agents at the bureau are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
Warner’s office said the FBI agents now deployed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent have been taken away from their work tackling cybercrimes, drug trafficking, terrorism, espionage, violent crimes, counterintelligence and other efforts that are part of the bureau’s mission – some areas that Trump has claimed are White House priorities.
The data, first reported by the Washington Post, suggests the FBI is dramatically shifting its objectives in an effort to back Trump’s increasingly aggressive immigration raids, with the administration targeting 3,000 daily arrests and seeking to expand its detention capacity to detain more than 100,000 immigrants.
The data is understating the scale of the reorganization, as the FBI only provided counts for agents who are now spending more than half of their job doing immigration enforcement, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now dedicated to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of the agents had been redirected to DHS.
