The FBI director, Kash Patel, and bureau leadership are shutting down a public corruption squad that worked with Special Counsel Jack Smith in his prosecution of President Trump. The move comes days after Mr. Patel reportedly instructed his agents to spend more time focusing on illegal immigration.

Based out of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, the public corruption unit, known as “CR-15”, will be shuttered and its agents reassigned to different squads, according to reports. The unit worked closely with Mr. Smith on two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, including his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, a case codenamed “Arctic Frost.” 

In the four months since he took office, Mr. Trump’s lieutenants have fired scores of federal prosecutors who aided Mr. Smith. FBI agents, by contrast, have union protections, but Trump loyalists at Main Justice have been gathering information on which FBI agents participated in Mr. Smith’s investigations and in the investigation of the January 6 unrest at the Capitol. The dismantling of CR-15 is likely part of Attorney General Bondi and Mr. Patel’s efforts to dismantle the apparatus that enabled what they call the weaponization of the federal government.

The Washington Field Office’s remaining two public corruption units will still be operational.

“In Washington, D.C., you turn over any rock, you’re going to find corruption,” a former supervisory special agent and counterintelligence historian, Raymond Batvinis, told the Sun. “If you have two public corruption squads, they should clearly be able to handle the workload,” he added. 

The closure of CR-15 comes on the heels of the FBI’s order to devote more agents to focus on illegal immigration “enforcement and removal” operations on a full-time basis, something that was traditionally handled by the Department of Homeland Security, according to reports. 

 The bureau aims to have 2,000 agents from across the country working full time on immigration “at any one time,” according to a memo obtained by NBC News. The bureau’s 25 largest field offices will now assign 45 percent of their agents to work on immigration full time, according to reports.

“The reprioritization of FBI resources to address the grave public safety threat of illegal immigrants, who are violent felons, is an entirely appropriate use of FBI investigative assets,” a former FBI supervisor and a conservative commentator, John Nantz, told the Sun. 

“Though resources may be prioritized to assist with ICE operations, this in no way suggests that white collar crimes will be ignored, or not properly assessed and investigated,” Mr. Nantz added.

The moves come at the same time Mr. Trump’s Department of Justice unveiled in a memo its new approach to white collar crime and the areas it will now be “laser-focused” on. These areas include health care fraud, sophisticated “Chinese Money Laundering Organizations,” trade and customs fraud, and corporate sanctions offenses, among others. 

Mr. Trump has been open about his unhappiness with the Biden DOJ’s pursuit of what he considered to be politicized prosecutions that garnered publicity for the prosecutors. 

Mr. Trump has also criticized what he deemed to be the aggressive prosecutions of entrepreneurs. In recent months, he pardoned the entrepreneurs Trevor Milton and Carlos Watson, as well as three men who may have gotten on the wrong side of the Biden family: former Hunter Biden associates Devon Archer and Jason Galanis; and Paul Walczak, whose mother was involved in clandestine efforts to publish Ashley Biden’s diary. 

Immigration activists protested the bureau’s intense new focus on the border, calling it “a very, very serious concern.”

“Instead of going after the real terrorists, we’re going to be going after people that are cleaning our yards, taking care of our kids, who are processing food, who are harvesting vegetables and so on,” the director of Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, Juan Jose Gutierrez, told NBC 4 Los Angeles. 

Others, like Mr. Nantz and Dr. Batvinis, did not interpret the change in priorities as an attempt by Mr. Patel and the current FBI leadership’s to undermine the FBI.

“The FBI is fully capable of doing many things at once, and when the illegal immigrant crisis subsides, FBI resources will certainly be repositioned to best confront the multifaceted threats to our national security,” Mr. Nantz said.

Also this week, Mr. Patel, whose bureau is facing a 5 percent proposed budget cut by the Trump administration for 2026, reportedly approved 667 early retirement requests made by FBI personnel.