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

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 previously into the melee. Last year, WIRED reported how DHS was building a database to track and surveil immigrants, pulling in data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Internal Revenue Service, and state-level voting data. Months later, even more agencies are involved.

WIRED spoke to workers across seven agencies including the SSA, the IRS, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), who described how their work has become an arm 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 “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” illegal immigration. The OMB, which creates the president’s budget and implements the administration’s policy agenda across agencies, is in the process of changing its guidance and requirements for who can get government grants.

OMB is now in the process of updating 2 CFR Part 200, or what’s 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 “must not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” several topics that have become a focus of the administration, including “racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination,” “denial of the recipient of the sex binary in humans,” “illegal immigration,” or “initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”

The rule would impact federal grants across 26 federal agencies. It is just the latest in turning immigration enforcement into an all-encompassing government effort.

A government worker who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation says that “there’s no way to determine some of these things objectively,” noting that supporting, say, the citizen children of undocumented immigrants could be interpreted as supporting “illegal immigration” in the eyes of someone like Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller. The determinations would be made before the grant is awarded, making it hard for the public or applicants to understand where these new requirements might be coming into play, the employee says. “I mean, it’s all about how far are they willing to stretch logic?” the employee says. “And I think they’ve proven that they’re willing to stretch it pretty damn 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 where some members may be citizens and others may be immigrants. In January, HUD assistant secretary Benjamin Hobbs sent out a letter to Public Housing Authorities (PHAs), local authorities authorized by the government to manage affordable housing funded by HUD, informing them that they would need to re-verify the immigration status and eligibility of every resident involved in housing. “HUD strongly encourages PHAs to require that families provide proof of citizenship by such means as birth certificates, naturalization certificates, passports, or other documentation,” the letter says.

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