Six senior career Justice Department officials have been told they are exiting their jobs and reassigned to new efforts to pursue legal action against so-called sanctuary cities, four Justice Department officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive insider matters.
A senior Justice Department official said two of the reassignments were Corey Amundson, who served as head of the Public Integrity Unit, and George Toskas, who served as deputy attorney general for the National Security Division. George Toscas).
It was not previously known that Amundson had been reassigned. The Public Integrity Unit prosecutes political corruption and played a role in two Justice Department criminal cases against former presidents.
NBC News previously reported that Toscas had been removed from his job. He played a key role in facilitating the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for documents that then-former President Donald Trump refused to return to the National Archives.
All Department of Environment and Natural Resources heads who help enforce environmental laws have been reassigned to the Sanctuary Cities Task Force, a source told NBC News.
A Department of Environment official wrote in an email that they had been assigned to the "Sanctuary Cities Environmental Working Group," citing an email they received from the show's attorneys who gave them 15 days' notice to move to a new position.
"Everyone they didn't like was thrown out there," another official said.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
It was unclear whether it would be required to temporarily relocate to other cities or whether enforcement efforts would be centralized within the 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 aimed at making the Justice Department more involved in finding undocumented immigrants and Enforcing violations of immigration laws.
The memo orders the department's civil division to study ways to pursue legal action against cities through so-called sanctuary laws, which prohibit local officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The memo also orders prosecutors to investigate potential prosecutions of any state or local officials who refuse or fail to comply with enforcement of federal immigration laws.
The moves follow a series of other actions by the Justice Department that mirror what's happening within other federal agencies, including the elimination of all diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs. These actions caused fear and anxiety among many career civil servants.
On Friday afternoon, the leader of the Justice Department’s gender equality efforts — career officials in the civil rights division — sent an email saying she was resigning. A source familiar with the matter said she took action after learning that the Office of Personnel Management was closing the federal government's employee affinity group.
The official, Stacey Young, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times earlier this month about career employees' concerns.
"To stay in our jobs, we will need more than just counsel; we will need legal, psychological and other practical support," she wrote. “One of the reasons many federal employees are considering leaving the government, often after decades under Republican and Democratic presidents, is that we are afraid. The government’s incoming leaders are telling us in a positive light that they want to We either disappear or suffer."
The Justice Department has eliminated jobs for dozens of people in the Attorney General’s Honors Program, a highly competitive, decades-old recruiting effort for top law school graduates, two Justice Department officials said. Some internships have also reportedly been cancelled.
Trump administration officials said the move was part of a presidential order imposing a 90-day federal hiring freeze. One former official said she saw interns in tears after being told their internships were cancelled.