This week, San Diego Sector agents picked up a Mexican national near Campo, shortly after he crossed into the country illegally. Processing and records checks flagged a prior homicide conviction in Mexico.

This is how the system is supposed to work, and the system rarely gets credit when it does. An agent catches an illegal entrant in the field, runs him through the checks, and finds out he's a convicted killer before he gets anywhere near a city. One arrest, one records hit, one murderer kept off American streets.

The arrest went down in the Campo area, a rugged stretch east of San Diego. Remote, rough country, exactly the kind of terrain where an illegal entrant figures he can slip through unnoticed. Not this time.

Per the Desert Review's report, the man was arrested shortly after the illegal entry and identified through records checks that flagged his prior homicide conviction south of the border. He now faces immigration proceedings and removal.

For years we were told vetting at the border was impossible, that we couldn't possibly know who's coming in, that any attempt to screen entrants was cruel theater. Then you look at cases like this one. The databases exist. The records checks exist. The agents exist. What makes the difference is whether illegal entrants get arrested and processed at the line in the first place. Catch somebody, run him through the system, check him against records, and murder convictions pop up right on schedule. When nobody's being processed at all, no database in the world can save you.

I stood at checkpoints for twelve years. The single most valuable tool I had wasn't a weapon or a vehicle. It was the ability to run a name and find out who I was talking to before the conversation started. Every time an agent runs those checks on a fresh arrest, they're doing the same thing, and every hit like this one makes you wonder how many bad actors are mixed into the flow of illegal crossings when enforcement goes slack.

The open-borders crowd will tell you this is an outlier, that most crossers are just folks seeking work. Fine, and most people at a DUI checkpoint are sober. We still run the checkpoint, because the ones who aren't sober kill people. This man had already killed someone, got convicted for it in his own country, and then walked toward ours. He got caught. My bet is he's not the only convicted killer who's tried that move in recent years, and I'd love to see the numbers on how many others made it through when the processing lines went dark. Until somebody proves otherwise, I'll keep assuming the worst, because the worst keeps turning out to be right.

Credit where it's due: San Diego Sector agents did their jobs in tough country and took a convicted murderer off the board on day one. That's enforcement working as designed. The score in this one goes on the board for the good guys, and I'll take that win any day of the week.