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.
