"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. As I followed a patrol of federal agents around New York City's Chinatown during their fumbling attempted raid in mid-October last year, I noticed something curious. I was following a small group with the immediately recognizable style of Stephen Miller's paramilitaristic vanguard: baggy street clothes, masked faces, weapons, and ballistic vests without specific insignia, just the catchall "POLICE" or "Federal Agent.""
"This is not typically what IRS-CI does. The comparatively small federal law enforcement agency, like the majority of its counterparts, is specialized around one area of enforcement, in this case tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax code-complex investigations requiring particularized skills, which is why the IRS' own job portal encourages "expertise in accounting." It is not part of the Department of Homeland Security or even the Department of Justice, residing under the IRS in the Treasury Department."
"Yet here was an IRS-CI agent on a foot patrol during a much larger operation that seemed primarily geared toward detaining random men whom agents deemed likely to be African, and she wasn't an anomaly. As a well-placed source confirmed to me contemporaneously, the operation had hastily brought in dozens of agents from ICE, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and the IRS, potentially among other agencies."
Federal agents conducted a chaotic mid-October foot patrol in New York City's Chinatown that included operatives from multiple agencies. An IRS Criminal Investigation agent participated despite IRS-CI specializing in tax-crime probes requiring accounting expertise and sitting under the Treasury Department rather than DHS or DOJ. The operation appeared focused on detaining random men perceived as likely African and drew agents from ICE, DEA, FBI, and IRS. Specialized federal agencies are being mobilized into broader, paramilitary-style street operations beyond their core mandates, creating blurred roles and potentially ad hoc deployments across law enforcement components.
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