Federal immigration agencies are stockpiling massive amounts of weapons and ammunition. During the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a February report from the office of Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “committed to spending more than $144 million on weapons, ammunition, and related accessories.”
That represents a huge increase—four times more than ICE’s 2024 contracts and double what CBP spent in 2024. The orders include thousands of rifles and handguns, more than $30 million in ammunition, and $25 million in “less-lethal” and crowd-control weapons.
Both agencies “have dramatically ramped up commitments to acquire sophisticated and deadly gear usually reserved for the U.S. military and highly trained, specialized police units,” Schiff’s report warns. But even if ICE and CBP were defunded, it would not be a mortal blow to the Trump administration’s ambitions. As journalist Felipe De La Hoz noted in a February 9 Slate article, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE and CBP, is just one part of a vast and increasingly interchangeable federal law enforcement “blob.”
De La Hoz observed the scope of the blob firsthand when he was covering an immigration raid and saw a federal agent wearing a vest that read IRS-CI—short for the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division. U.S. marshals, Bureau of Prisons officers, and agents employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives also have been spotted working with ICE. De La Hoz described “a catchall national police force operating at the direction of the White House itself, used for diffuse political goals like immigration enforcement, speech crackdowns, and occupying politically oppositional cities.”
In truth, obscure law enforcement components of federal departments have been quietly arming themselves for years. Often those developments come to public attention only when someone wonders when those guys got machine guns.
In 2013, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agents wearing body armor and toting rifles raided a gold mining operation in Alaska to investigate potential Clean Water Act violations. The raid outraged Republicans.
“In a classic case of federal government power creep, close to 200 armed EPA agents are roaming our country,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R–Alaska) said in response to the incident. “It is a disturbing fact.” Sullivan introduced legislation to strip the EPA of its weapons, but the bill never passed.
To his credit, Sullivan has been more skeptical of ICE enforcement than most of his Republican colleagues. But if an armed EPA agent is disturbing, surely an armed IRS agent roaming the streets should send shivers down the spine of any freedom-loving American. Like its horror movie namesake, the federal police blob should be frozen and chopped to pieces.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Beware the ‘Blob’ of Federal Police.”
