Before this year, ATF had played almost no role in immigration enforcement. It typically investigated firearms offenses, bombings, arson and illicit shipments of alcohol and tobacco.
But since Trump’s inauguration, about 80% of its roughly 2,500 agents have been ordered to take on at least some immigration enforcement tasks, two officials familiar with ATF's operations said. The ATF agents are being used largely as “fugitive hunters” to find migrants living in the U.S. illegally, one of the officials said.
The DEA, whose roughly 10,000 staff have led the nation’s efforts to battle drug cartels, has shifted about a quarter of its work to immigration operations, said a former official briefed by current DEA leaders on the changes. Two other former officials described the commitment as “substantial” but did not know precisely how much work shifted.
Many of the reassigned federal officials have had little training or experience in immigration law, the sources said. The State Department’s 2,500 Security Service agents, for instance, typically protect diplomats and root out visa and passport fraud. They’ve been authorized to assist with “investigating, determining the location of, and apprehending, any alien” in the U.S. unlawfully, according to a February 18 memo from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to the U.S. Secretary of State.
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At Homeland Security Investigations, the top investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, scores of agents who specialize in child sexual exploitation have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, said Matthew Allen, a former senior HSI official who now leads the Association of Customs and HSI Special Agents, whose members include about 1,000 current and former agents.
Over the past two years, those HSI agents have helped more than 3,000 child victims, often after complex probes, DHS data shows. “There’s a good argument that these changes will lead to some child victims continuing to be exploited,” said Allen.
