The controversial deployment of federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C. by President Donald Trump is reportedly putting the FBI’s fleet of unmarked vehicles at risk, and potentially jeopardizing its most sensitive national security and surveillance operations, Reuters reports.
Nine current and former bureau employees have issued a stark warning, voicing concerns that the policing surge could obstruct efforts to fight violent criminal gangs, foreign intelligence agencies, and drug traffickers.
The White House’s stated goal of the strategy is to tackle violent crime, though many arrests in the District of Columbia have been for minor offences, and National Guard troops have been seen picking up trash. President Trump has declared the operation a success, claiming that Washington is now “crime-free.”
The deployment of up to 1,000 unmarked FBI cars and SUVs into highly public areas of the capital comes at a time when cartels, gangs, and hostile nations are actively trying to identify agents and their vehicles, according to current and former FBI employees.
“Every time you see us getting out of covert cars wearing our FBI vests, that car is ‘burned,’” one of eight current FBI employees told Reuters.
A second employee added: “We can’t use these cars to go undercover, we can’t use them to surveil narcotraffickers and fentanyl suppliers or Russian or Chinese spies or use them to go after violent criminal gangs or terrorists.”
John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator, highlighted the risk.
“They’re putting federal agents in a more highly visible situation where they’re driving their undercover cars and they’re engaging in highly visible public enforcement action or patrol actions,” he said. “They may be unwittingly compromising the ability of those same personnel to go back and engage in sensitive investigations.”
As President Trump publicly mulls expanding the federal crackdown to cities like Chicago and Baltimore, the FBI employees are urging leadership to stop exposing more vehicles.
The Independent has asked the FBI and the White House for comment.
FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, assistant director of the FBI’s public affairs office, denied the employees’ claims. In an email to Reuters, he stated: “The claims in this story represents a basic misunderstanding of how FBI security protocol works — the Bureau takes multiple safeguards to protect agents in the field against threats so they can continue doing their great work protecting the American people.”
He continued: “FBI leadership hasn’t received any of the concerns alleged here, and anyone who did have a good faith concern would approach leaders at headquarters or our Washington Field Office rather than laundering bizarre claims through the press.”
The FBI employees said they voiced concerns to Reuters because of the potential risks to national security and public safety. Several urged an immediate end to the use of undercover cars.
“This is crazy, dangerous, and bad for the bureau,” said Dan Brunner, a former FBI agent who retired in September 2023 after a two-decade career including work on MS-13 street gang cases.
Brunner noted that D.C. is “the most saturated city with foreign nation spies, foreign actors, so of course they’re going to be down there. So those guys, you know, their vehicles, their license plates are getting recorded.”
While Reuters could not confirm that foreign actors were tracking vehicles, Brunner, Cohen, and the anonymous FBI employees emphasized that investigative targets continually try to identify law enforcement.
“It is a major threat facing U.S. law enforcement,” said Cohen, now executive director for the Center for Internet Security’s program for countering hybrid threats. He and several FBI sources cited a recent Justice Department report from its internal watchdog detailing how such information can be exploited.
In 2018, a hacker working for the Sinaloa Cartel accessed an FBI employee’s phone records in Mexico City and tapped into city cameras to help the cartel identify, track, and kill FBI witnesses and sources.
“This isn’t a hypothetical issue, just look at what happened in Mexico City,” a third current FBI employee warned.
Brunner proposed that, at a minimum, all cars’ license plates used should be replaced. He and others suggested that the bureau consider using rented or borrowed vehicles from other government agencies for future deployments.
Cohen acknowledged that “highly visible law enforcement presence in high-crime areas can serve as a deterrent for crime.” But he added that “at the same time, the value that comes from the federal government in fighting violent crime is through their investigations, which very often are conducted in a way in which the identity and the resources and the vehicles of the investigators are kept, you know, secret.”
Trump invoked Section 740 of the Home Rule Act last month in order to take emergency control of D.C.’s policing and send in members of the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies to assist the Metropolitan Police Department in tackling urban crime.
The District of Columbia sued Thursday to stop Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops during his law enforcement action in Washington.
The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, said the surge of troops essentially amounts to an “involuntary military occupation.” He argued in the federal lawsuit that the deployment, which coincides with an executive order from August 11 and now involves more than 1,000 service members, constitutes an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
