FBI field offices across the country are shifting resources and agents to assist in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
It’s not yet clear how much time and energy is being reallocated to immigration, but former top law enforcement officials in Massachusetts are alarmed that already-limited resources are being taken away from other priorities.
“The FBI should investigate federal crimes committed by people who are unlawfully in the country,” said Stephen Cody, a former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney who now teaches criminal law at Suffolk University Law School. “But do we really want to take FBI teams off investigations of violent jihadist or homegrown terrorists to target illegal immigrants with minor offenses? Do we want the FBI to stop the next Boston bomber, or deport more low-level offenders?”
Cody says chasing people who are law-abiding workers, outside of coming to the United States illegally, is the wrong focus.
“Federal law enforcement has never prioritized white-collar crime, and diverting already limited resources from vital investigations of corporate criminality and public corruption — a couple examples are Purdue Pharma pushing OxyContin, Volkswagen rigging cars to pass emissions tests,” he said. “If you stop focusing on cases like those, it sends a clear message to Wall Street and public officials: ‘No one’s watching. Do what you want.’”
The FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., tells GBH News that the Department of Homeland Security has recently asked for its support on immigration-enforcement efforts led by Homeland Security.
“The FBI contribution to this effort can vary depending on specific DHS needs,” a spokesperson with the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs told GBH News by email Thursday, “however, specialized resources such as SWAT operators, who can support high risk arrest operations, or other resources such as intelligence analysts and technical assistance are readily available.”
A spokesperson for the Boston FBI office said it will be “continuing to assist our partners” at DHS in response to questions from GBH News.
DHS did not immediately respond to questions from GBH News.
To Carmen Ortiz, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, that’s “unfortunate.”
“We continue to read how many resources are already being pumped into immigration with respect to securing the border and using military troops,” she told GBH News. “I think everyone thought that the key focus was to deport individuals who are illegally in this country who had criminal records — who had convictions, who were murderers, rapists, burglars.”
Ortiz believes that shifting FBI resources to carry out a mission through “administration warrants” and not “arrest warrants” could be illegal and needs to be reevaluated and redone. She said all the individuals are entitled to due process.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been detaining and arresting people in the Boston area in far greater numbers in recent weeks, local watchdogs and community groups say. Ortiz worries about FBI resources going toward operations that don’t involve violent crime — like the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national and Tufts graduate student, whose student visa was revoked. She was detained by ICE for two months for authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper about the war in Gaza.
“There are individuals who have no criminal records, international students who have been arrested. And so they’re using their resources to target the individuals that we didn’t initially think they were going to.” said Ortiz, who now serves as a partner at Anderson and Krieger in Boston.
Aloke Chakravarty, a former federal prosecutor on the Boston Marathon bombing case and former attorney for the FBI, agreed that the directive could pull resources from national security issues. But he said he’s not surprised that the Trump administration is moving over resources from other agencies based on campaign trail promises.
“Any time you prioritize one type of enforcement over others that means that you’re not going to be able to cover a lot of the priorities that — particularly for the FBI — that they have historically done,” said Chakravarty, now an attorney at Saul Ewing Law Office in Boston.
The bureau’s work sometimes involves immigration when it comes to efforts like the Joint Terrorism Task Force. But he said that’s a national security issue, not a matter of border enforcement.
