State Department funds for countering foreign election interference. Senior staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Department of Homeland Security budget for an office focused on weapons of mass destruction. Training programs for prison guards.

Those are just some of the federal resources that the Trump administration has redirected to support the president’s mass deportation agenda without congressional input.

NOTUS identified at least six programs or accounts, largely related to national security, across the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State where spending, staff or other resources were directed toward immigration and deportation operations, deviating from Congress’ original intention.

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These are funds and resources being used on top of the $75 billion boost in funding that Republicans included for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their budget reconciliation bill last year.

“As somebody who joined DHS in 2005, shortly after it was formed, this feels like the biggest reorienting of federal resources toward a single end since 9/11,” said Theresa Brown, a former DHS official in the Obama and Bush administrations. “We’re not creating a new department, but we are telling the entire federal government: This is now your No. 1 mission.”

The Trump administration has said it views immigration enforcement as a whole-of-government operation. Previously unreported internal federal agency documents and footnotes in the Office of Management and Budget’s apportionments database provide a new window into which federal resources have been redirected to make that happen.

They also renew questions about Congress’ flagging power of the purse.

“I’ve been very concerned about this diversion of funds for these purposes,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who serves on the Senate’s appropriations committee and its DHS subcommittee, told NOTUS.

“It seemed that monies were finding their way from other agency accounts into ICE. So I don’t think the guardrails are strong enough or high enough,” he added.

DHS, DOJ and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

At FEMA, senior staff typically in charge of the nation’s disaster response coordinated a recruitment program for Department of Defense employees to volunteer for southern border assignments, according to internal agency information obtained by NOTUS.

FEMA also hosted recruitment activities for DOD officials, and agency staff was paid overtime to work on the coordination effort, according to information reviewed by NOTUS.

DOJ and DHS share a major training facility for most of their officers. After DHS launched a massive immigration officer recruitment campaign in the summer of 2025, the DOJ found that its training classes for the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives staff were being canceled so DHS could schedule more for its new immigration hires, according to a September DOJ memo to the White House.

Nearly all of the classes for DOJ officials were canceled in the final few months of 2025. The DOJ anticipated that classes in 2026 would continue to be constrained by the DHS hiring surge, especially the more advanced training needed for Bureau of Prisons officials, according to the memo.

The canceled classes could make it harder for the DOJ to retain staff and new recruits, Brown said, especially because many DOJ officials cannot do their full jobs in the field until they have completed their training.

Within DHS itself, NOTUS found that at least twice in 2025, the agency redirected money to ICE that was originally intended for the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office: one lump of money for training and another for a national biosurveillance center. In both cases, the funding was transferred to “support the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Custody Operations and Homeland Security Investigations,” according to the OMB’s apportionments database.

The money for the transfers came from funds Congress appropriated for the 2025 fiscal year, according to OMB’s database.

And at the State Department, when the Trump administration restructured and shrank the agency, it also redirected some of its dollars for immigration purposes.

In one case, the State Department shuttered the office tasked with combatting efforts by foreign governments to manipulate U.S. citizens and spread propaganda and misinformation. About $25 million of that office’s funds were repurposed for administration priorities that included “migration-related messaging,” according to State’s spending plan outlined last June and made public on the OMB website in March.

In another, State paid $4.76 million out of an account intended to help address crime problems in Central America. The payment went to the government of El Salvador in exchange for them placing more than 200 people deported from the United States into El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the mega-prison commonly known as CECOT, according to internal agency documents released during litigation with Democracy Forward relating to Freedom of Information Act requests.

The State Department recommended skipping the normal requirement that Congress be notified that the payment was going to be made, according to an internal memo reviewed by NOTUS.

In the memo, a State Department official admitted that it was “rare” to see the State Department skip Congressional notification requirements “due to concerns about Congressional relations and future funding.”

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that explicitly directed all federal agencies to focus their resources and efforts on immigration and deportation.

Congress often leaves room for change in its appropriations bills, giving presidents the ability to shift some money and staff as needed. But this time, the White House left Congress largely in the dark about its exact reprioritization of resources in response to the executive order. Traditionally, the executive branch has an open line of communication with Congress when it needs to move resources, and an understanding that agencies will otherwise act in the spirit of Congress’ instructions.

“Having that flexibility, historically, has been a useful thing,” said Christie Wentworth, senior policy counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “When you have comity between the branches and they’re talking to each other, there is this understanding that the agencies know what Congress wants.”

The lack of communication has left many in Congress frustrated with changes they still don’t know the full extent of.

“Sometimes with administrations that tend to play by the rules, they seek congressional approval before they make transfers. But this is an administration that doesn’t play by the rules,” Van Hollen said.

In some cases, the Trump administration’s redirection was not a transfer, but instead an expansion of responsibility. Take the case of Homeland Security Investigations, a division of DHS that traditionally investigated terrorists and global criminal networks.

Trump’s January 2025 executive order declared that HSI’s “primary mission” was going to become the enforcement of immigration laws. HSI officials have since been spotted working alongside Border Patrol and ICE during the administration’s immigration “surges” into places like Minneapolis.

A Democratic staffer familiar with HSI told NOTUS that DHS has provided very little information about its actions in this area and in others areas where resources are being repurposed for immigration efforts.

“We’re concerned that they’ve been taken away from their human trafficking and drug smuggling investigations,” said the staffer, who asked for anonymity to discuss private concerns.

Because investigations regarding national security issues can take years, Brown warned that moving investigative experts at HSI to immigration enforcement could result in a loss of leads, witnesses and more.

“We don’t necessarily know what we’ve lost there,” she said.

On a larger scale, the changes speak to a diminished Congress under the second Trump administration.

Trump’s approach to the federal government has put a “burden on Congress to think about every potential contingency and make sure that they’re taking away that discretion for executive branch agencies,” Wentworth said.

“Simply because they are unwilling to actually communicate with and respond to the directive that Congress has put into law,” she added.