ICE had a week, and the booking sheets read like a most-wanted list. The agency announced a run of high-profile arrests, and this batch was not the usual administrative arrests of people who simply crossed illegally. These were convicted murderers, drug traffickers, and child abusers, the kind of people any country with a functioning spine removes first and asks questions later. The Gateway Pundit has the rundown.

Twenty-six years on the border taught me one thing about enforcement: the count is the count. You don't round up. You don't inflate. And you don't pretend a bus fare violation is the same as a homicide conviction. When ICE puts out a release stacking killers on top of child abusers on top of traffickers, that's the count doing the talking.

A word on process, for readers who don't eat DHS press releases for breakfast like I do. Arrests like these generally come through a few channels. Some come through detainers, which are the holds ICE lodges with local jails asking them to hold an illegal alien for pickup after release. Those work great, unless the jail is in a sanctuary jurisdiction that ignores the detainer and puts a convicted felon back on the street instead of handing him to a federal agent standing right there. That's my commentary on the system, not a claim about this particular sweep. Targeted operations, agents working from criminal history and last-known addresses, do the rest of the work. Either way, being in the country illegally is itself a violation of the law. That never stopped being true. The last crew just pretended otherwise.

What stands out in this sweep is the quality of the targets. Murderers. Child abusers. Traffickers moving product through our interior. The open-borders crowd swears ICE never focuses on people like this, usually about ten minutes before ICE announces it arrested another one. The talking point that enforcement only sweeps up harmless grandmothers falls apart every time the actual booking sheets drop, and it fell apart again here.

Give a deportation officer a solid target list and the green light to work it, and he will out-produce any enforcement program dreamed up by a think tank. Always has. In my judgment, the agency is working that kind of list right now, and it shows.

The next step is removal. An arrest is a win on the scoreboard, but the game closes when the plane lands in the home country and the guy walks down the stairs. Watch the removal flight numbers, not just the arrest totals. Both matter, and I'll be tracking both.

The count says killers, predators, and traffickers are off our streets and in removal proceedings. I'll take the next one just like it.