Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has requested that the Treasury Department provide Internal Revenue Service personnel to assist with immigration enforcement, marking the Trump administration’s latest effort to expand federal resources to fulfill his campaign pledge to deport more undocumented immigrants.
In a Feb. 7 memo to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Noem cited several areas in which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs additional help, including pursuing financial audits of businesses suspected of having undocumented workers; focusing on human smuggling and trafficking; and assisting with apprehensions, detentions and removals of individuals who are in the country illegally.
Noem cited President Donald Trump’s “Securing Our Borders” executive order, which directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to “take all appropriate and lawful action to deploy sufficient personnel along the southern border of the United States.” Noem noted that the Treasury Department “has qualified law enforcement personnel available to assist with immigration enforcement” and cited “recent increases to the Internal Revenue Service’s workforce and budget.”
Noem wrote that law enforcement officials from the Treasury Department would have the authority to enforce immigration laws.
The memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The proposal for IRS criminal investigators to assist with immigration crackdowns comes at an uncertain time for the agency. Budget improvements in 2022 revitalized its staffing and enforcement efforts, but Trump and congressional Republicans have been critical of the agency’s increase in funding. Trump moved to install a new IRS commissioner, Billy Long, in December and halted hiring for new criminal investigation agents in January. The IRS’s Biden-era commissioner, Danny Werfel, resigned last month with two years left in his five-year term.
In addition to the Treasury Department, DHS is working with the Defense Department to follow through on Trump’s campaign promise to enact what he billed as the largest deportation operation in American history. Last week, the Trump administration began to send migrants to Guantánamo Bay, a move that has worried immigrant advocates.
The IRS and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The IRS criminal investigation division is tasked with investigating financial crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking and identity theft. The division had 2,290 special agents in 2024, a 10% increase from 2022, according to its annual report.
Agents in the criminal investigation division are law enforcement officers who can make arrests, and they often work alongside the FBI and other federal agencies when responding to financial crime. Employees in the criminal investigation division made up about 3% of the IRS’s total workforce in 2024, according to its annual report.
In 2024, the criminal investigation division identified more than $2 billion in tax fraud and $7 billion in other financial crimes. It initiated more than 2,600 criminal investigations and obtained more than 1,500 convictions last year, according to its annual report.
The IRS received a boost in 2022 when congressional Democrats infused it with tens of billions of dollars in funding. The $80 billion budget expansion came with a primary goal of bolstering the IRS’s ability to investigate financial crimes, which provoked agitation among Republicans, who have frequently cast the agency’s criminal investigation division as a complicated bureaucracy that scrutinizes average Americans.
“Instead of having Biden’s 87,000 IRS agents take more money from Americans, I have requested that they help taxpayers SAVE money by helping ICE round up criminal illegal aliens for deportation,” Noem said on X on Monday.
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Nick Miroff contributed to this report.