FBI Agents Are Being Reassigned to ICE at Shocking Rates

Iran has damaged half of our bases in the Middle East, a Republican tried to put a Holocaust denier on a Holocaust education board, and the border wall bulldozed a 1,000-year-old archaeological site

Good evening. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Iran has damaged the majority of American military sites in the Middle East. The FBI has quietly become one of the largest immigration enforcement agencies in the country. A Republican lawmaker tried to put a Holocaust denier on New Hampshire’s Holocaust education board. And the border wall just bulldozed a 1,000-year-old Indigenous archaeological site.

Before we get started, AlterNet America was built as a direct challenge to billionaire control of the American press. When the ultra-wealthy own the outlets, they own the narrative. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a business model. Independent media exists to break that stranglehold, but only if readers step up to fund it. If you believe independent media matters, become a paying subscriber today.

Now, let’s dive in.

Iran Has Damaged the Majority of U.S. Bases in the Middle East

16.

At least 16 American military sites have been damaged in Iranian strikes. That’s the majority of U.S. positions in the Middle East.

That’s not Iranian propaganda. That’s a CNN investigation published today, and it matches what NBC News reported earlier this week from six people familiar with the damage: runways, high-end radar systems, dozens of aircraft, warehouses, command headquarters, hangars, and satellite communications infrastructure were all struck.

The destruction spans several countries and could cost up to $5 billion to repair. That figure doesn’t include weapons systems, aircraft, and other equipment that were either impaired or rendered unsalvageable.

To be precise about what “unsalvageable” means in practice: other damaged resources include at least one fighter jet, a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones, two MC-130 tankers, helicopters, and an E-3 Sentry plane.

The Pentagon’s response to all of this: “We do not discuss battle damage assessments for operation security reasons. Our forces remain fully operational.” “Fully operational” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a sentence about twelve destroyed drones and runways that no longer exist.

One in Four FBI Employees Are Working Immigration

A quick civics refresher: the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates federal crimes. Counterterrorism, organized crime, public corruption — that sort of thing.

Here’s what it does now. The FBI multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

There were 279 FBI personnel working on immigration-related matters before Trump took office in January 2025. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total workforce of 38,000.

There has been no corresponding surge in cartel prosecutions or trafficking convictions to explain the scale. What the numbers do show is an agency that was functioning as the largest immigration enforcement operation in the country — bigger than ICE itself.

That is nearly one in four FBI employees redirected toward immigration enforcement. Not counterterrorism or organized crime. Not the public corruption that, one might note, is currently very much ongoing.

A Republican tried to put a Holocaust denier on a Holocaust education board

New Hampshire held a hearing on Holocaust education. A Holocaust denier testified. The Holocaust denier in question also has an unrelated criminal record involving a playground and some tiger-print shorts. We’ll get to that.

Matt Sabourin dit Choinière, a Republican state lawmaker in New Hampshire, partnered with a notorious German Holocaust denier in an effort to insert Holocaust denial into the state’s public education guidelines.

The Holocaust denier is Germar Rudolf, a German chemist who has previously been deported from the United States and served prison time in his home country for propagating Holocaust denial. Sabourin dit Choinière’s proposed amendment would have added Rudolf’s organization to the state’s Holocaust education commission. It failed.

Here is the detail that earns its own paragraph. Rudolf was convicted in Pennsylvania of open lewdness and indecent exposure after a police officer found him naked from the waist down at a children’s playground at 4 a.m. Local law enforcement was familiar with Rudolf because police had previously encountered him swimming nude in a nearby river.

Rudolf maintains he was wearing “skimpy” tiger-print shorts to exercise. He has written about receiving workout tips from David Duke.

In related news, a different New Hampshire Republican lawmaker is currently facing a disciplinary hearing for tweeting a “final solution” reference at a Jewish colleague. It has been quite a session in Concord.

The Border Wall Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Sacred Indigenous Site

Somewhere in the Arizona desert, there is a 200-foot fish that was etched into the ground by Indigenous people a thousand years ago. There is also now a 60-foot gap through it.

The intaglio has been surveyed and documented by archaeologist Richard Martynec since he found it in 2002. On April 23rd, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, a Department of Homeland Security contractor ran heavy machinery through the middle of it.

Construction crews destroyed a roughly 60-to-70-foot swath of it.

This was not an accident no one saw coming. The refuge had been in discussions with the DHS to make sure the site was protected. Martynec visited the site in mid-April and saw stakes an engineer had put in place to mark the boundaries of the intaglio.

The stakes were there. The site was known. The contractor cut through it anyway.

The DHS issued waivers so that border wall construction does not have to follow laws that protect the environment or Indigenous sites. The administration is building three miles of new wall per week.

The fish etching took a thousand years to make. It took one morning to destroy.

What You Can Do About It

Bari Weiss is remaking American television news one institution at a time, replacing veterans with Free Press alumni and calling it disruption. The CBS Evening News is down below 4 million viewers. 60 Minutes is next. What she’s building is a media apparatus answerable to a specific worldview, funded by a specific class of people.

The stories tonight share something in common beyond the obvious. In each case, there was a record, a warning, a set of stakes in the ground. The FBI’s numbers were in a FOIA response. The damage to U.S. bases is in satellite imagery. The New Hampshire hearing was livestreamed. The intaglio had been surveyed for 20 years.

The information exists. The question is who’s paying attention.

AlterNet America is built to help you pay attention without a billionaire’s agenda shaping what you see and what you don’t. Every subscription funds another week of this. If tonight’s newsletter was worth something to you, please consider making it sustainable and upgrade your subscription.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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Fema employees who criticized Trump cuts reinstated after months on leave. Fourteen FEMA employees who spent eight months on paid administrative leave for signing a letter warning that administration policies risked a Katrina-scale disaster were reinstated Thursday, just in time for hurricane season. One reinstated staffer said she felt “vindicated.” She also said FEMA is “arguably in a worse state than it was” when she signed the letter. So, vindicated and correct.

New York officials return more than 650 antiquities valued at $14m to India. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg returned 657 antiquities worth nearly $14 million to India this week. The pieces were recovered from trafficking networks that had been looting temples and archaeological sites for decades and selling them through galleries. One of the items, a $7.5 million Buddha statue, had been sitting in a trafficker’s storage unit.

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