A newly publicized memo from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asks the IRS to deploy its agents to help with the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
The memo, first obtained by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is dated Feb. 7 and asks Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for use of some of the IRS’s roughly 2,000 law enforcement officers trained to investigate tax violations and other financial crimes.
“It is D.H.S.’s understanding that the Department of the Treasury has qualified law enforcement personnel available to assist with immigration enforcement, especially in light of recent increases to the Internal Revenue Service’s work force and budget,” Noem’s memo says.
The request says IRS agents would help with various immigration crackdown efforts, including the investigation of employers who may have hired undocumented workers and the physical detainment and removal of migrants from the U.S.
Deputizing IRS agents for deportations would likely limit the agency’s ability to focus on financial crimes ― something former President Joe Biden’s administration worked to support with more funding.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump, whose Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud and other crimes in 2022 by a New York jury, boasted that he “immediately halted the hiring of any new IRS agents” and floated the idea Noem pitches in her memo.
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“We’re in the process of developing a plan to either terminate all of them or maybe we’ll move them to the border. I think we’re going to move them to the border,” Trump said at a Nevada rally in January.
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Noem’s memo.
The homeland security secretary notes in her memo that DHS has already partnered with the Justice Department, the Texas National Guard and the Texas Attorney General’s office to carry out Trump’s immigration clampdown, which involves widespread immigration raids. Though he spent much of his campaign talking about targeting “criminal” undocumented people, Trump’s deportations have not been narrowly focused on people with criminal records.