President Donald Trump has proposed that around 88,000 newly hired Internal Revenue Service agents, should be reassigned to work on the U.S.-Mexico border.
During an event at the Circa Resort & Casino in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump told supporters he plans to deploy the agents to the southern border to help Border Patrol with apprehending illegal immigrants attempting to cross into the U.S.
Trump further criticized former President Joe Biden and his administration for hiring the additional agents, which came at a cost of an estimated $72 billion, earmarked under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
According to the Tampa Free Press, Trump has implemented a 90-day freeze on all new federal hires across most agencies through an executive order, which includes the IRS, while the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reviews staffing needs across the board.
“On day one, I immediately halted the hiring of any new IRS agents,” Trump told supporters, “You know … they hired, or tried to hire, 88,000 new workers to go after you, and we’re in the process of developing a plan to either terminate all of them or maybe we’ll move them to the border. I think we’re gonna move them to the border. Well, they’re allowed to carry guns, you know they’re so strong on guns. But these people are allowed to carry guns, so we’ll probably move them to the border.”
Details on Trump’s implementation plan are set to be released over the coming weeks, but are likely to be met with legal scrutiny, Tampa Free Press reported.
Trump also floated the idea of nixing the federal income tax all together for Americans and replacing it fully with tariffs on foreign goods.
“You know, if the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen if you wanna know the truth,” Trump said, “You know, years ago, 1870 to 1913, we didn’t have an income tax, what we had was tariffs, where foreign countries came in and they stole our jobs, they stole our companies, they stole our product, they ripped us off … They used to do numbers, and then we went to tariffs, a tariff system, and the tariff system made so much money. It was when we were the richest.”
