How Federal Agencies Got Caught Up in Trump’s Anti-Immigration Crusade

That of President Donald Trump The administration has made immigration the centerpiece of its political agenda. Within government, agencies have been asked to find new offices for immigration authorities, share sensitive immigrant data and help keep immigrants away from government services.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) received an unprecedented amount of funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated nearly $80 billion to DHS, including $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone. ICE has doubled in size since Trump took office; the agency says it has hired an additional 12,000 new agents.

But the effort to target immigrants expanded beyond DHS and across the government, drawing into the fray agencies whose work had little or nothing to do with immigration. Last year, WIRED reported how DHS was creating a database to track and monitor immigrants, pulling data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), Internal Revenue Service and state-level voting data. Months later, even more agencies are involved.

WIRED spoke with workers from seven agencies, including the SSA, the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who described how their work became a part of the administration’s immigration agenda. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Office of Management and Budget

States and nonprofits could see their access to government grants cut off if the government determines that the money could be used to “finance, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” illegal immigration. The OMB, which creates the president’s budget and implements the administration’s policy agenda across all agencies, is changing its guidelines and requirements for who can receive government grants.

OMB is currently in the process of updating 2 CFR Part 200, or what is known as the Uniform Guidance for Federal Grants, according to sources who have seen the draft update. The new guidance will now include language saying that federal grants “shall not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” several topics that have become a priority of the administration, including “racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination,” “recipient denial of the gender binary in humans,” “illegal immigration” or “initiatives that compromise public safety or promote un-American values.”

The rule would impact federal grants to 26 federal agencies. This is just the latest step in transforming immigration control into a comprehensive government effort.

A government employee who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation said that “there’s no way to objectively determine some of these things,” noting that supporting, for example, citizen children of undocumented immigrants could be construed as support for “illegal immigration” in the eyes of someone like Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller. Decisions would be made before the grant is awarded, making it difficult for the public or applicants to understand where these new requirements might come into play, the employee says. “I mean, it all depends on how far are they willing to push the logic?” » said the employee. “And I think they’ve proven that they’re willing to go very far.”

The OMB did not respond to a request for comment.

Department of Housing and Urban Development

At HUD, the target has been “mixed-status households,” families in which some members may be citizens and others may be immigrants. In January, HUD Deputy Secretary Benjamin Hobbs sent a letter to local public housing authorities (PHAs), local authorities authorized by the government to manage HUD-funded affordable housing, informing them that they should double-check the immigration status and eligibility of each resident involved in a housing unit. “HUD strongly encourages PHAs to require families to provide proof of citizenship through means such as birth certificates, naturalization certificates, passports, or other documents,” the letter states.

The letter adds that if a PHA knows that a resident is “not lawfully present” in the United States, “then the PHA must provide DHS with a report indicating the person’s name, address, and other identifying information that it has.”