Homeland Security reassigns ‘hundreds’ of CISA cyber staffers to support Trump’s deportation crackdown

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is reassigning hundreds of employees crossed respective of its agencies to assistance successful the Trump administration’s wide migration crackdown, and volition disregard staffers who garbage to comply, according to quality reports.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the section moved staffers from the U.S. cybersecurity bureau CISA, galore of whom absorption connected issuing cyber guidance to assistance U.S. authorities agencies and captious infrastructure support from cyber threats, to different agencies wrong the national department, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). 

Both Bloomberg and Nextgov reported that galore of the affected CISA staffers are successful the agency’s Capacity Building unit, which helps to amended the cybersecurity posture of national agencies, arsenic good arsenic the Stakeholder Engagement Division, a radical that leads CISA’s partnerships with planetary agencies and organizations. 

Other CISA staffers person been moved to the Federal Protective Service, a constabulary portion that works with ICE and CBP connected deportations, per the publications.

The Trump medication has made migration enforcement a flagship argumentation since taking bureau successful January, with lawmakers successful July authorizing $150 cardinal successful payer funding to enactment deportations by ICE. Much of the backing volition spell towards utilizing technology, from spyware to information brokers and determination data, to way millions of individuals crossed the United States. 

News of the reassignments comes astatine a clip erstwhile the U.S. is facing a question of hacks targeting backstage manufacture and the national government.

In caller weeks, an English-speaking transgression pack person stolen reams of information from dozens of companies who store lawsuit accusation successful Salesforce databases; Russian hackers have stolen sealed documents from the U.S. national courts system; and a SharePoint bug earlier this twelvemonth allowed hackers to breach respective U.S. national departments, including the bureau tasked with maintaining the information of the U.S. government’s stockpile of atomic weapons.

In an emailed statement, Homeland Security adjunct caput Tricia McLaughlin told TechCrunch that the bureau “routinely aligns unit to conscionable ngo priorities portion ensuring continuity crossed each halfway ngo areas,” and did not quality the media reports that hundreds of staffers would beryllium reassigned. 

McLaughlin said, “Any conception that DHS is unprepared to grip threats to our federation due to the fact that of these realignments is ludicrous.” But McLaughlin would not say, erstwhile asked by TechCrunch, if the reassigned CISA roles would beryllium backfilled oregon would stay vacant.