Half a dozen senior career Justice Department officials have been told they are being removed from their jobs and reassigned to a new effort to take legal action against so-called sanctuary cities, four DOJ officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal personnel matters.
Two of those reassigned, one senior DOJ official said, were Corey Amundson, who had been head of the public integrity section, and George Toscas, who had been deputy assistant attorney general in the national security division.
It was not previously known that Amundson had been reassigned. The public integrity section prosecutes political corruption and played a role in both DOJ criminal cases against the former president.
NBC News had previously reported that Toscas had been removed from his job. He played a key role in pushing for the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents that Donald Trump, then a former president, had declined to return to the National Archives.
All of the section chiefs in the environmental and natural resources division, which helps enforce environmental law, have been reassigned to the sanctuary cities task force as well, a source told NBC News.
One of the environmental division officials wrote in an email that they had been assigned to the “Sanctuary Cities Environmental Working Group,” citing an email they received from the acting attorney general that gave them a 15-day notice to move to the new position.
“Everyone they don’t like is being dumped there,” another official said.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
It was unclear whether those being reassigned were being asked to relocate temporarily to other cities or whether the enforcement effort would be centered inside Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
As NBC News previously reported, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memo to the workforce on Wednesday outlining a series of policy changes designed to get the DOJ more involved in finding undocumented immigrants and enforcing violations of immigration law.
The memo ordered the department’s civil division to examine ways to take legal action against cities with so-called sanctuary laws that forbid local officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The memo also ordered prosecutors to investigate for potential prosecution any state or local officials who resist or fail to comply with the enforcement of federal immigration law.
Fear and anxiety
The moves come amid a series of other actions at the Justice Department that mirror what has been occurring inside other federal agencies, including the cancellation of all diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs. The moves have stoked fear and anxiety among many career civil servants.
On Friday afternoon, the leader of the Justice Department’s gender equality effort — a career official in the civil rights division — sent an email saying she was resigning. A source familiar with the matter said she made the move after she learned the Office of Personnel Management was moving to shut down employee affinity groups across the federal government.
The official, Stacey Young, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times earlier this month about the concerns of career employees.
“To stay in our jobs, we will need more than exhortation; we will need legal, psychological and other practical support,” she wrote. “One reason many federal employees are thinking of leaving government — often after decades of serving our country under Republican and Democratic presidents — is that we’re afraid. The incoming leaders of the government have told us in aggressive terms that they want us either gone or miserable.”
Two Justice Department officials said the DOJ has rescinded job offers to dozens of people in the Attorney General’s Honors Program, a highly competitive, decades-old recruiting effort aimed at top law school graduates. Some internships have also reportedly been canceled.
Trump administration officials say the moves were required as part of the president’s order imposing a 90-day federal hiring freeze. One former official said she saw interns in tears after they were informed their internships were being canceled.
