The Trump administration is rapidly repurposing law enforcement agencies to focus on what President Donald Trump called “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
But while the American public sees a ballooning security force raiding offices and restaurants, recently departed government officials see something else: a political takeover of the Department of Justice by the Department of Homeland Security that is already draining resources from crucial security work.
“DHS is taking over DOJ. We’re allowing people with access to run rampant and treat what were quasi-independent institutions as arms of the policy staff of the White House,” one former high-ranking FBI official told NOTUS.
Former officials who spoke to NOTUS said Trump’s push for more deportation personnel is making other law enforcement work more difficult.
“We would get calls needing 20 people tomorrow, which sounds like nothing for ICE, but that’s like an entire field office,” one recently departed employee from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told NOTUS of asks from the DOJ. “You would need to assign every special agent in a region to cover the ICE stuff. So then, no one is doing gun investigations.”
Former FBI officials say they’re worried about the effect of reassigning special agents who spent years honing skills for infiltrating spy networks, countering foreign hackers or monitoring Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
“State and local police aren’t equipped to look at SVR officers or a pattern of fraudulent activity by a health care company that’s overbilling across the nation. That’s your loss,” said one former FBI official.
People who formerly worked at the agencies told NOTUS they see the coalescing of power at DHS as a way for Trump to cement his grip over law enforcement.
“If you consolidate it, you only have to rely on one set of loyalists instead of 30,” said another former high-ranking FBI official.
Former agents tell NOTUS law enforcement personnel now get the sense that Attorney General Pam Bondi plays second fiddle to border czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
Miller has taken a particularly aggressive role in law enforcement operations. Miller, Axios and the Washington Examiner recently reported, tore into top DHS officials at a May 21 meeting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters, where he reportedly demanded they meet a quota of 3,000 daily arrests.
Within days, ICE ramped up its raids — with reassigned federal agents from every other agency in tow.
“The issue is that Stephen Miller is basically bullying Pam Bondi. The DOJ has been weakened. She’s supposed to be the number one law enforcement officer in the United States. Stephen Miller is running around her in circles,” said a former high-ranking official with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Trump’s distrust of DOJ, which exploded during the criminal investigations into his conduct in 2021, has helped marginalize the department as he strengthens DHS, which in some ways has broader search and surveillance legal authorities.
Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, top department officials who were both previously Trump’s personal defense lawyers, have taken charge of removing experienced DOJ prosecutors for their past work on criminal cases against Trump or Jan. 6 rioters. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel continues to push out bureau veterans who have run afoul of Republicans in the past.
By contrast, Trump last month ordered DHS to expand its “removal operations force” by 20,000 officers by either deputizing local police or drawing from “personnel within other federal agencies.” Their mission? “To conduct an intensive campaign to remove illegal aliens who have failed to depart voluntarily.”
Half a dozen former federal law enforcement agents tell NOTUS the ongoing transformation of U.S. law enforcement has deeply roiled “1811s,” a reference to the government designation for criminal investigators at various agencies.
There’s now a wellspring of discontent that threatens to bring early retirements, sources told NOTUS.
“It’s idiotic. There are so many retirements right now at DEA,” the former DEA official said. “Think about going after some undocumented kid versus a fentanyl trafficker. They care about saving lives, not this illegal immigration. They care about going after the cartel and holding people accountable.”
That person also said they’re concerned that the DEA’s confidential informants could be leveraged by other intelligence agencies — ruining long-term investigations or putting sources in danger.
“This Department of Justice will continue to work side-by-side with our partners at the Department of Homeland Security to take America back from the vicious gangs and cartels that poison our communities and terrorize our neighborhoods,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement for this story. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”
But Bondi did hear similar concerns when she visited the Hill this week.
On Monday, Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro berated Bondi during a congressional appropriations hearing over the expected 26% cut to ATF and 4.4% reduction to DEA.
“So you’re going to merge the two agencies together and then you’re going to shortchange their resources so neither one of them will be able to do the job that they have been designed to do!” she said.
“They all want to be on the streets. They want to be working with DEA,” Bondi replied.
One former high-ranking FBI official said Trump’s Day 1 executive order establishing federal “Homeland Security Task Forces” gives a sense of how the administration plans to unify law enforcement.
Earlier this month, the FBI announced it had started one in Kansas City to partner up with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations — the agency-within-an-agency that has become home to Trump’s chief deportation enforcers.
The FBI-HSI Kansas City announcement states that “the objective of the task force will be to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations operating in America’s heartland.” But former law enforcement agents tell NOTUS that this could easily expand into all kinds of domestic-focused criminal investigations.
They pointed to the way the Trump administration, having designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in February, has already had ICE arrest and deport Venezuelan migrants deemed “enemy aliens” without presenting any evidence in court that they are in fact members of the gang.
Former federal agents say the Trump administration is clearly building off the “Joint Terrorism Task Force” model that started as an effort to combat bank robberies in New York City in the 1970s, only to later morph into intelligence-sharing hubs in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which came after profound intelligence sharing failures.
“The basic philosophy after 9/11 was that we get all the federal and state and local agencies in the same room working on the same investigations, and they all have different authorities and resources so they can complement each other’s efforts,” said one former FBI agent.
The JTTF model leans on each investigative agency’s expertise. That means the FBI could investigate a criminal financial network, get visa records from the State Department and tap Customs and Border Protection agents to conduct targeted searches of particular people on their way into the country.
Former agents say that same model, now under the “homeland security” banner, could supercharge Trump’s law enforcement priorities.
“The problem with Homeland Security Task Forces is that they’re trying to make everybody interchangeable,” a former agent said. “You have FBI agents with law degrees or advanced graduate degrees, who are used to using [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] to take down entire organizations, wasting their time going on arrest teams for what half the time end up being grandmothers and children.”
Pro-gun conservatives, for example, have long sought to limit the reach and investigative capabilities of firearms regulators at ATF. But now those capabilities are poised to be brought under the banner of immigration enforcement — and what Trump has already signaled would be operations against American citizens and permanent residents, which he calls “homegrowns.”
‘If I were a gun owner, I’d be wondering who has my data, because ATF has data. Who are they giving access to?” said the former ATF employee.
A former FBI official expressed deep concerns with the way Border Patrol has been operating predator drones over Los Angeles during the recent protests against ICE raids there.
“I don’t believe the average American has an understanding of how invasive that is,” they said. “Most people don’t understand the level of technical sophistication that Customs and DEA has. A drone you can’t see or hear can capture your cell phone’s IMSI. You think you’re there protesting anonymously. They can build a robust dataset through techniques honed in during the war on drugs overseas.”
The former DEA official who spoke to NOTUS stressed that the kind of sensitive spy work conducted by that agency was never meant to be deployed at home — or transferred over to other intelligence agencies that aren’t limited by law to abide by court-approved search warrants.
“My fear under this current setup is that these agencies are being pushed to share everything,” they said. “Americans need to be protected.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.