The FBI Has Deputized Local Cops as Federal Agents. Communities Are Resisting.

As the Trump administration widens its crackdown on immigrant communities and progressive activists, federal task forces are playing an important behind-the-scenes role. Organizers warn that institutions like the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are targeting vulnerable communities and sharing the kind of information that facilitates Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. But some say the current political climate also presents opportunities as appetites grow for local and state agencies to cut ties with the federal task forces endangering their communities.

“We have an opportunity for more allies because more people are upset, more people feel that they are impacted, more people see their neighbor being dragged away, and they don’t like it, and so the body of people that feel like something should be done is larger,” Tracy Rosenberg, advocacy director at Oakland Privacy, told Truthout. “We should take advantage of that to protect people who have been vulnerable this whole time.”

JTTFs deputize state or local police officers as federal agents, meaning a local cop who is contracted to work with a JTTF has the same policing powers as an FBI agent, and the Department of Justice can shield them from litigation and local oversight. Often, those police officers no longer have to follow their own departmental regulations on the use of force or body-worn cameras. The arrangements also come with federal dollars and gear.

“The laws that apply to [local and state law enforcement agents in JTTFs] are the federal standards,” Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates, explained to Truthout. That means that “if there are more protective standards around privacy or around sanctuary that operate in a city or locality, then typically the agreements that underpin these task forces make the federal law the standard — sanctuary becomes kind of obsolete, and additional privacy protections don’t apply.”

There are about 200 such task forces nationwide with hundreds of participating state, local, and federal agencies. Other federal or state agencies have similar programs, such as ICE’s Border Enforcement Security Task Force and the network of state-owned and federally funded fusion centers. The task forces have well-documented records of profiling low-income and immigrant communities, as well as communities of color. They also have histories of targeting Muslims and civil and human rights groups.

“The purported purpose is to enable collaboration and information sharing [and] that makes it sound kind of reasonable to your average person,” Waheed told Truthout. “But when it goes into monitoring people as a way of quote-unquote ‘preventing crime,’ that’s where it gets really dangerous.”

Risks are heightened further under the second Trump administration because its National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7) and its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy cast a wide net. That counterterrorism strategy directs the Justice Department, FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to target “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” NSPM-7 specifically tasks JTTFs with executing its aims. Civil rights groups have called the memo a threat to human rights and civil liberties. When local or state cops join JTTFs, they, too, become responsible for carrying out these directives.

“Now that we have the Trump 2.0 administration and [NSPM-7], which essentially declares that any groups that disagree with Trump policies are potential terrorists, that kind of targeting based on politics or political opinion becomes much more broad and much more harmful,” Waheed told Truthout.

The activities of the JTTFs and other federal task forces could also put immigrant community members at risk amid Trump’s immigration raids. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, one of the agency’s two law enforcement components alongside Enforcement and Removal Operations, is one of the largest and most active contributors to JTTFs nationwide.

“When we share information in the context of going after guns, or going after drugs, or going after whatever the subject of the task force is, we are giving them the ability to repurpose that information and use it specifically to track down folks that are undocumented, or folks that have green cards, or [temporary protected status], or asylum,” Rosenberg told Truthout.

Because of the federal government’s heightened attacks on vulnerable communities, organizers told Truthout that pressuring state and local agencies to cut ties with federal task forces is more urgent than ever before. Several cities nationwide have already done so, though it is difficult to track the exact number. The agreements that agencies enter into to participate in the task forces are often kept quiet and can be renewed or ended without fanfare. For example, a recent investigation by Western Massachusetts-based news outlet The Shoestring found that most area agencies have quietly ended their participation in the Boston JTTF since 2014. A source for The Shoestring suggested that tight department budgets could be one reason for their exit.

Some high-profile pressure campaigns have also ended in victory for progressive organizers and offer a model for other cities. Among them, the San Francisco Police Department declined to renew its participation in the JTTF in 2017 after civil rights groups raised the alarm about the task force profiling Muslim community members and undermining local rules meant to prevent police abuses. Two years later, the Portland, Oregon, City Council voted to withdraw the city’s police force from the area’s task force, citing its lack of civilian oversight.

Oakland City Council also voted to end the Oakland Police Department’s (OPD) partnership with the area JTTF in 2020 after a years-long effort to make the actions of local cops participating in the task force more transparent and curb violations of local law. “What we tried to do in Oakland was tie it to surveillance transparency, which is basically the idea that the public deserves to know what kind of spying the government is doing on the populace and it deserves regular and transparent reporting,” Rosenberg told Truthout.

In 2017, Oakland passed an ordinance requiring OPD officers participating in the area JTTF to report on whether their actions with the task force violated local laws. The department often failed to comply with reporting requirements, but even the patchwork information obtained showed that OPD may have violated the city’s sanctuary laws and that JTTF officers were deployed to surveil people protesting for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. OPD officers working with the JTTF violated departmental use-of-force policies dozens of times during those protests.

“That became the fuel for a campaign that said ‘Look, some of the activities of these task forces are not consistent with what we’re trying to do in the city of Oakland [or] with the values that our city council has been talking about, and therefore, why don’t we just get out of these things?,’” Rosenberg told Truthout. The eventual city council vote to leave the task force was unanimous.

Currently, organizers in Boston are also pushing to end funding for a fusion center, called the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC, with their Get the BRIC Out of Boston campaign. Fusion centers were designed to increase the amount of personal information available to law enforcement and government agencies and were rolled out during the ramping up of surveillance that followed 9/11. Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy calls them “spy centers” because of their vast surveillance powers.

BRIC maintains a system of street cameras through which it monitors residents of the metro Boston region around the clock in real time and a gang database that profiles Black and Brown people based on often racist indicators, such as being a past victim of violence, having tattoos, or wearing certain sports team logos. BRIC shares the information it accumulates not only among local agencies but also with federal agencies, including ICE.

“BRIC surveilled Occupy Boston really blatantly; it’s been surveilling the Palestine movement; [and] during Trump’s first administration there were a bunch of deportations because of BRIC’s gang database and student information being shared through BRIC ties,” Fatema Ahmad, executive director of Muslim Justice League, told Truthout. Muslim Justice League is among the organizations leading the Get the BRIC Out of Boston campaign; the Muslim community has historically been among the most harmed by the institution’s actions.

For organizers elsewhere already invested in the struggles to protect communities caught in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, Waheed told Truthout that being aware of and confronting federal task forces operating in the area should be part of the fight. “For organizers on the ground, they need to know that in addition whatever they’re fighting for, whether it’s [against] surveillance tech or new dungeons for immigrants, then in addition to that, it’s important to look at the different ways in which their local communities are cooperating with the federal government through task forces like [JTTFs],” she said.

Rosenberg recommends raising the issue with local governments that are upset with attacks on their constituents. “When city councilors get up and start saying ‘Well, this happened in our community, and we’re upset, and we don’t like it,’ then your role as an activist is to say ‘Well, there are some things that we can do about it; we could pull out of these federal task forces and not share information with them so gratuitously because we don’t like how they’re acting in our community,’” she told Truthout. “Because what’s happening on our sidewalks, what the feds are doing in our communities — that’s not public safety.”