White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s push to have the FBI assist in the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown has been put on ice.
Instead of going on immigration raids, sources told Fox News and NBC News that the majority of FBI agents on immigration duty are now returning to traditional roles to thwart possible threats from Iran and its proxies.
The pivot back to counterterrorism will place FBI agents in a more traditional role. It comes a month after Miller mandated ICE make at least 3,000 migrant arrests a day in a heated meeting at its D.C. headquarters. NBC reported at the time that 2,000 agents from the FBI, DEA, and the Marshals Service were ordered to embed with ICE to boost arrest numbers. Many of those agents are now being pulled back to their day jobs.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Guess they are realizing this whole national security thing is important, after all,” a source with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC.
The FBI wrote in a statement that it “does not comment on specific operational adjustments or personnel decisions.”
“However, we continuously assess and realign our resources to respond to the most pressing threats to our national security and to ensure the safety of the American people,” the statement added.
ABC News reported that many of the agents who were briefly ordered to work with ICE had been pulled from monitoring “counterterrorism and cyber issues.” Sources told the network that the FBI’s recall of a “couple thousand agents” is a direct result of the U.S. bombing of Iran, which has raised fears of retaliation stateside.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that Israel and Iran had reached a ceasefire. However, Iran trolled Trump later in the day and declared that its nuclear program, which Trump said was “obliterated” by U.S. bombers, will “resume without interruption.”
It is unclear if ICE’s daily quota arrests will be lowered now that it is losing a large swatch of support provided by the FBI.
The agency has pivoted from prioritizing undocumented immigrants accused of crimes to targeting anyone in the country without documentation, including lowly-paid farmworkers in California, day workers at Home Depot locations, and even high school student asylum seekers.
