Federal agents who usually hunt down child abusers are now cracking down on immigrants who live in the U.S. illegally, Reuters reported.

Homeland Security investigators who specialize in money laundering are raiding restaurants and other small businesses looking for immigrants who aren’t authorized to work and agents who pursue drug traffickers and tax fraud are being reassigned to enforce immigration law.

As U.S. President Donald Trump pledges to deport “millions and millions” of “criminal aliens,” thousands of federal law enforcement officials from multiple agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime-fighting resources away on other areas — from drug trafficking and terrorism to sexual abuse and fraud, Reuters reported Sunday.

This account of Trump’s push to reorganize federal law enforcement – the most significant since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former federal agents, attorneys and other federal officials. 

Most had first-hand knowledge of the changes. Nearly all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their work.

“I do not recall ever seeing this wide a spectrum of federal government resources all being turned toward immigration enforcement,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former Homeland Security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. 

“When you’re telling agencies to stop what you’ve been doing and do this now, whatever else they were doing takes a back seat.”

In response to questions from Reuters, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the U.S. government is “mobilizing federal and state law enforcement to find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens.” 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to respond to questions about its staffing. 

In a statement, the FBI said it is “protecting the U.S. from many threats.” 

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has offered no comprehensive accounting of the revamp. But it echoes the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, when Congress created the Department of Homeland Security that pulled together 169,000 federal employees from other agencies and refocused the FBI on battling terrorism.

Trump’s hardline approach to deporting immigrants has intensified America’s already-stark partisan divide. 

The U.S. Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, described the crackdown as a “wasteful, misguided diversion of resources.” 

In a statement to Reuters, he said it was “making America less safe” by drawing agents and officials away from fighting corporate fraud, terrorism, child sexual exploitation and other crimes.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in an interview with Reuters, denied the changes across federal law enforcement were hindering other important criminal investigations. 

“I completely reject the idea that because we’re prioritizing immigration that we are not simultaneously full-force going after violent crime.”

He said the crackdown was warranted. “President Trump views what has happened over the last couple years truly as an invasion, so that’s how we’re trying to remedy that.”

On January 20, his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order, directing federal agencies to team up to fight “an invasion” of illegal immigrants. He cast the nation’s estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally as the driving factor behind crime, gang violence and drug trafficking – assertions not supported by government statistics, – and accused immigrants of draining U.S. government resources and depriving citizens of jobs.

Almost immediately, federal law enforcement started posting photos of the crackdown to social media: agents wore body armor and jackets emblazoned with names of multiple agencies – including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as ATF – during raids on immigrants without proper legal status.

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 results, so far, are mixed: the number of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border in February was the lowest in decades and the number of people detained over immigration violations has surged. That hasn’t yet led to an increase in deportations, but experts expect a jump in those numbers in coming months.

Uganda’s army said it killed 242 fighters belonging to a Congolese rebel group known as CODECO after they attacked a Ugandan military camp across the border in east Congo earlier this week, a claim disputed by the group.

Uganda military spokesperson Chris Magezi said hundreds of CODECO fighters attacked a Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF) military post in the Congo locality of Fataki, in the province of Ituri, on Wednesday and Thursday.

The army retaliated on both occasions, killing 31 militants on the first day and 211 on the second day, Magezi said in a post on X late on Friday. One UPDF soldier was killed and four others injured, he added.

CODECO spokesperson Basa Zukpa Gerson refuted the army’s account on Saturday, saying that the group only lost two fighters and that the UPDF death toll was higher.

A United Nations source who did not wish to be named said 70 rebels and 12 Ugandan troops were killed.

There were further clashes between the two sides on Saturday morning, CODECO and a local civil society leader said.

CODECO fighters say their aim is to defend Lendu farmers from Hema herders, which have historically clashed over land.

The group is one of a myriad of militias fighting over land and mineral resources in east Congo, where Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have stepped up an offensive this year and made unprecedented gains.

The conflict, rooted in the fallout from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and competition for mineral riches such as tantalum and gold, is eastern Congo’s worst since a 1998-2003 war that drew in multiple neighbouring countries and left millions dead.

Uganda sent troops to Congo in 2021 to help the government fight another rebel group, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which is affiliated with the Islamic State and stages brutal attacks on villages.

UPDF troops were deployed to northern Ituri a few weeks ago to prevent the ADF from infiltrating the area, and to stop hundreds of Congo refugees from fleeing into Uganda, Magezi said.

(Reuters) 

Flanked by students and educators, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order intended to essentially dismantle the federal Department of Education, making good on a longstanding campaign promise to conservatives.

The order is designed to leave school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards, a prospect that alarms liberal education advocates, Reuters reported.

Thursday’s order was a first step “to eliminate” the department, Trump said at a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House. Shuttering the agency completely requires an act of Congress, and Trump lacks the votes for that.

“We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs,” said Trump in front of a colorful backdrop of state flags.

Young students invited to the event sat at classroom desks encircling the president and signed their own mock executive orders alongside him.

The signing followed the department’s announcement last week that it would lay off nearly half of its staff, in step with Trump’s sweeping efforts to reduce the size of a federal government he considers to be bloated and inefficient.

Education has long been a political lightning rod in the United States. Conservatives favor local control over education policy and school-choice options that help private and religious schools, and left-leaning voters largely support robust funding for public schools and diversity programs.

But Trump has elevated the fight to a different level, making it part of a generalized push against what conservatives view as liberal indoctrination in America’s schools from the university level down to K-12 instruction.

He has sought to re-engineer higher education in the United States by reducing funding and pushing to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies at colleges and universities, just as he has in the federal government.

Columbia University, for example, faced a Thursday deadline to respond to demands to tighten restrictions on campus protests as preconditions for opening talks on restoring $400 million in suspended federal funding.

The White House also argues the Education Department is a waste of money, citing mediocre test scores, disappointing literacy rates and lax math skills among students as proof that the return on the agency’s trillions of dollars in investment was poor.

Local battles over K-12 curricula accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, which saw parents angrily confront officials at school board meetings nationwide. It was a discontent that Trump, other Republican candidates and conservative advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty tapped into.

Trump was joined at the ceremony by Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Democrats acknowledged on Thursday that Trump could effectively gut the department without congressional action.

“Donald Trump knows perfectly well he can’t abolish the Department of Education without Congress – but he understands that if you fire all the staff and smash it to pieces, you might get a similar, devastating result,” U.S. Senator Patty Murray said in a statement.

SEEKING CLOSURE

Trump suggested on Thursday that he will still seek to close down the department entirely, and that he wants Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who attended the White House event, to put herself out of a job.

The department oversees some 100,000 public and 34,000 private schools in the United States, although more than 85% of public school funding comes from state and local governments. It provides federal grants for needy schools and programs, including money to pay teachers of children with special needs, fund arts programs and replace outdated infrastructure.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion in student loans held by tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford to pay for college outright.

For now, Trump’s executive order aims to whittle the department down to basic functions such as administering student loans, Pell Grants that help low-income students attend college and resources for children with special needs.

“We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said. “It’s doing us no good.”

Though Republicans control both chambers of Congress, Democratic support would be required to achieve the needed 60 votes in the Senate for such a bill to pass. At the event, Trump said the matter may ultimately land before Congress in a vote to do away with the department entirely.

Trump has acknowledged that he would need buy-in from Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ unions to fulfill his campaign pledge of fully closing the department. He likely will never get it.

“See you in court,” the head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said in a statement.

A majority of the American public do not support closing the department.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found last month that respondents opposed shuttering the Department of Education by roughly two to one – 65% to 30%. The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online and nationwide, surveyed 4,145 U.S. adults and its results had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.

Federal aid tends to flow more to Republican-leaning states than Democratic ones. It accounted for 15% of all K-12 revenue in states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election, compared with 11% of revenue in states that voted for his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to a Reuters analysis of Census Bureau data.

Two programs administered by the Department of Education — aid for low-income schools and students with special needs — are the largest of those federal aid programs.