A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, WIRED reported on a phenomenon that would consume the next year of his presidency: Corners of the federal government were being subsumed by the administration’s crackdown on immigration and immigrants around the country.
In April 2025, WIRED reporters Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott reported that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was building a master database to surveil and track immigrants using data from not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but also the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voting records. This data, WIRED was the first to report, could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
It was also extremely unusual: These data systems were intentionally siloed to protect individual data, experts told WIRED, and hadn’t ever been knitted together—much less put in service of tracking down immigrants.
That data grab, WIRED went on to report, put immigrants as well as US citizens at risk of being caught up in the administration’s immigration dragnet. It also illustrated a new reality: Agencies in the US government that had never been involved in immigration enforcement before were suddenly conscripted into service.
In February 2026, WIRED editor Leah Feiger published an investigation into ICE’s expansion across the US, focusing on the office space ICE was working to lease at breakneck speed. The agency wasn’t working alone: According to records obtained by WIRED, ICE and DHS relied on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that manages federal buildings and functions as the government’s internal IT department, to carry out its secret expansion campaign. WIRED found that more than 150 leases and office expansions would place new facilities in nearly every state, and we published many of those addresses in the article. Several of these locations were located in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas, near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.
In numerous emails and memorandums viewed by WIRED, DHS asked the GSA explicitly to disregard usual government contracting and listing procedures, in one instance claiming “national security concerns.”
WIRED went on to report how different government agencies got caught up in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crusade, speaking with workers from different departments about how, for the very first time, their work had been twisted to support ICE and other immigration efforts. At the Department of Defense, for example, secretary Pete Hegseth pushed his employees to volunteer to assist in the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has upended countless lives, and the way in which the government has been remade to support this singular effort will be its most enduring bureaucratic legacy. WIRED has led the reporting on those dramatic changes from the start.
