The count for the weekend: at least 11 arrests across the Puget Sound region, including one within sight of a Fiestas Patrias parade in Seattle. That's per reports compiled by MSN over the holiday weekend.

Fiestas Patrias, for those who don't track the calendar, is Mexican Independence Day weekend. Big parades, big crowds. It's also a weekend when ICE has historically been active in sanctuary jurisdictions, because Seattle is one, and King County has spent years refusing cooperation agreements that would make these arrests cleaner and safer for everybody involved.

Eleven arrests spread across a metro area of four million people is not a dragnet. I ran operations in the Tucson sector for 26 years and I know what a sweep looks like. This was targeted enforcement. You get a name, you get an address or a workplace, you go get the guy. The difference now is that Seattle's policies force it to happen in parking lots and on street corners instead of inside a jail, where a detainer would have held the same person for a calm handoff.

A detainer, for anyone new to this beat, is a request ICE files with a local jail asking them to hold an illegal alien for up to 48 hours so agents can come take custody. King County won't honor them. Neither will Seattle. So instead of picking somebody up on a burglary charge at the county lockup, agents have to find him at a parade. The city's leadership made that trade, and the activists who scream about "community fear" every time an arrest happens in public never seem to connect those two dots.

They connected zero dots this weekend either. You can expect the usual statements about families afraid to celebrate. I'd ask the follow-up question nobody at the press conferences asks: what were the charges on the 11? Because ICE in Washington has been working criminal docket priorities, and when an arrest happens near a parade, it usually means the target was near the parade. Agents weren't sweeping up revelers. But the details get sorted out weeks later in the court filings, long after the headlines about "fear" have done their work.

I've kept a notebook my whole career and one thing holds true everywhere: the arrest itself is the boring part. The paperwork tells you whether it was a good arrest. Eleven arrests, eleven files, and every one of them will get its day. If any of them turn out to be a bystander with no record, I'll say so plainly, because I don't inflate the count. I never rooted for a bust to be bigger than it was.

But I'll also say this. Washington's sanctuary rules don't stop enforcement. They just decide where it happens. A jailhouse pickup takes two agents twenty minutes. A street arrest near a festival takes a team, surveillance, and a plan, and it puts everybody, agents, the target, and the public, closer to risk than they need to be. The counties that honor detainers get quieter arrests and safer ones. King County gets parade-adjacent headlines and pretends that's compassion.

The count stands at 11 for the region this weekend. Watch the federal court dockets over the next month if you want to know who they were. That's where the real story always lands.

Scoreboard: 11 arrests, Puget Sound, Fiestas Patrias weekend. Enforcement happened anyway. It always does. The only question is how messy the sanctuary crowd wants to make it.