ICE has been busy. The latest batch of arrests reads like a police blotter from a city nobody wants to live in. Multiple rapists and a convicted murderer are off the streets and in custody, per Townhall's report on the recent operations.

For anyone new to the beat, a word on how these arrests usually happen. When ICE picks up an illegal alien with a criminal conviction, it usually comes down to one of two things: a detainer that local law enforcement honored, or old-fashioned fieldwork where officers go find the guy themselves. A detainer is a request ICE sends to a jail asking them to hold an illegal alien briefly so ICE can come take custody. In sanctuary jurisdictions, the jail ignores the detainer, the guy walks out the front door, and ICE has to go arrest him at home, at work, or at a gas station. Harder. More dangerous. Wastes everyone's time. ICE does it anyway.

The Townhall report doesn't break down the circumstances of each arrest, so I won't guess. What we know is who ICE caught: rapists and a convicted murderer. What I can tell you is how cases like this tend to go. Convicted sex offenders serve their time, walk out, and no deportation follows. This beat sees that pattern over and over. Sanctuary policy hands federal officers the hard job of finding these guys after the fact instead of the easy job of collecting them at the county jail. That's a policy choice that puts convicted criminals back into neighborhoods, and we're supposed to pretend the people making it are the compassionate ones.

The convicted murderer is the headline grabber, and rightly so. A murder conviction means a trial, a sentence, and typically a release date at the end of it. When a man like that is still in the country illegally long after his debt to society is paid, the fair question is who had the chance to hand him to ICE and passed. I don't have the file on this one, so I'll ask the question rather than answer it.

The standard response from the open-borders crowd is that ICE arrests are scary raids on hardworking families. Then an arrest list like this one comes out and it's rapists and murderers. The advocates know what shows up on these lists. They count on you not reading them. Read them.

None of this happens by accident. Arrests like these take officers running surveillance, checking databases, and knocking on doors, because in too many places the easy version, picking the guy up at the county jail, got taken off the table by politicians who won't be there when he reoffends.

So the count ticks up. Rapists: in custody. Convicted murderer: in custody. The scoreboard doesn't care about press conferences. Neither do I.