Immigration

Alternet America -    A quick civics refresher: the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates federal crimes. Counterterrorism, organized crime, public corruption — that sort of thing.

Here’s what it does now. The FBI multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

There were 279 FBI personnel working on immigration-related matters before Trump took office in January 2025. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total workforce of 38,000.

There has been no corresponding surge in cartel prosecutions or trafficking convictions to explain the scale. What the numbers do show is an agency that was functioning as the largest immigration enforcement operation in the country — bigger than ICE itself.