Mass Deportations Do Not Make Us Safer

“FBI agents reassigned to round up immigrants have had to walk away from investigations into violent predators who target and exploit children online,” a new report reveals.

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation fixation have become a boon to drug traffickers, domestic extremists, child predators and other criminals who may now be getting away with their heinous acts due to the administration’s obsession with rounding up and purging our nation of immigrants, a devastating MSNBC report has revealed. According to recent data, 70% of immigrants in ICE custody have no criminal record at all.

“FBI agents reassigned to round up immigrants have had to walk away from investigations into violent predators who target and exploit children online,” MSNBC reports, with data revealing that the Trump administration has pulled more than 2,800 agents from crime-fighting investigations in order to focus on mass deportations. That has included pulling agents from their investigation of members of 764, a “nihilistic violent extremist” group that coerces vulnerable children “to post graphic sexual imagery of themselves and then blackmails them to post more imagery, including images of self-harm.”

“In March, Baltimore domestic terrorism squad members were told they were being deployed full time to help the Department of Homeland Security round up undocumented immigrants, the sources told MSNBC,” the report said. “The 764 cases are still open, but many fewer agents are now assigned to work on them, they say.”

But it’s not just the FBI. Key law enforcement agencies tasked with keeping our families and communities safe are losing thousands of agents to Miller’s pernicious obsession with non-white people. Special investigative agents who previously helped thousands of child victims have been reassigned while other law enforcement experts working to tackle the scourge of illicit fentanyl trafficking now have to tackle working immigrant parents instead. This week, CNN said its investigation had identified more than 100 U.S. citizen kids, “from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year.”

The Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) division, which focuses on combating terrorism, child exploitation, and human trafficking, has lost its entire unit – all 6,000 special agents – to Miller, USA Today reported in February. Critical threats that could now go under-investigated include “child exploitation crimes, cyberattacks and Dark Web financial schemes, Iranian and Chinese nuclear traffickers, Russian organized crime, trade fraud and sanctions investigations.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has seen similar loss in resources, losing 80% of the 2,500 agents investigating gun trafficking, bombings, and arson to Miller’s mass deportation agenda. And over at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), roughly 25% of operations have shifted from targeting drug cartels and fentanyl traffickers to carrying out immigration raids.

Remember that it wasn’t that long ago that Trump and his political allies were pretending to care about the nation’s deadly fentanyl crisis as pretext to further demonize immigrant communities, some going so far as to amplify a wild conspiracy theory that fentanyl was being intentionally imported into the United States as a way of killing white people.

FEMA, historically tasked as the federal government’s disaster response agency, has also not been immune from the administration’s agenda despite having nothing to do with immigration enforcement. As we noted last month, the administration ordered dozens of workers from the already-downsized agency to help ICE hire as many as 10,000 additional masked agents funded under the Big, Ugly budget. And workers who didn’t agree to the reassignments could reportedly be “subject to removal from Federal service,” The Washington Post reported.

Half a dozen current and former FEMA officials warned in the report that losing dozens more FEMA employees to ICE, “even for a few months, will greatly slow operations while the already much-reduced agency is juggling multiple ongoing disaster declarations, including the historic Texas floods,” which resulted in the deaths of more than 120 people, including more than 35 children.

Warnings from former FEMA officials have continued. During a Wednesday press call moderated by America’s Voice, Rafael Lemaitre, a former Director of Public Affairs for FEMA, said the administration’s actions “are putting us on track to painfully relearn the tragic lessons of Hurricane Katrina.” He said that after important reforms that were implemented following the Bush administration botched response to the 2005 disaster, FEMA is now being “gutted” as two potential storms are brewing in the Atlantic coast.

“There is a tremendous amount of brain drain now going on at the agency, because of this culture of fear that’s been instilled at the agency, where you have top-level, seasoned emergency managers that are non-political people – and they are fleeing the agency,” he said. “Those are years of experience that people are not going to get back, that we can’t get back overnight, and you can’t just hire the next day. So I have a very real fear that our nation is going to be unprepared during the next major disaster.”

“Every dollar DHS diverts away from FEMA and towards mass deportations is a dollar taken away from disaster survivors and vulnerable communities,” Lemaitre noted.

Local communities are also being forced into the fray. The expanded collusion between ICE and local law enforcement combined with efforts by the mass deportation agency to poach local police officers diverts already-stretched departments from tackling local crime. Plus, the administration’s cuts to federal safety grants for cities pulled funds for 50 police officers in Chicago alone. The Big, Ugly budget funding mass deportation may be Miller’s dream come true, but for our immigrant neighbors and other everyday Americans, it’s a public safety nightmare.

“The administration routinely justifies its indiscriminate immigration agenda in the name of alleged public safety, essentially criminalizing anyone who is not a U.S. citizen,” said American Immigration Council Policy Director Nayna Gupta. “But the reality is that these resource diversions and realignment of federal and state government resources make Americans less safe—putting the U.S. government and state and local leaders in the position of abandoning traditional public safety priorities in favor of immigration arrests, mostly of people who pose no threat and make invaluable contributions to the country.”