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

WIRED spoke with workers across seven government agencies—from the IRS to HUD—about how their work has been contorted to support ICE and other immigration efforts.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made immigration the centerpiece of its policy agenda. Across the government, agencies have been asked to find new offices for immigration authorities, share sensitive data on immigrants, and help push immigrants off of government services.

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

But the effort to target immigrants has spread beyond DHS and across the government, pulling agencies whose work had little or nothing to do with immigration ...