The Guardian ran a long piece this weekend on how ICE operates now, and I'll give the British press credit where it's due: they did their homework. They embedded the reporting in actual numbers, and the numbers say ICE is making more arrests than ever. You can read it here.

The core of the story is a tactical shift, and it's one I watched develop over 26 years in the Border Patrol. ICE spent the early part of this administration running what people called siege operations. Dozens of agents, armored vehicles, a perimeter around a neighborhood, cameras rolling. It looked impressive on television. Produced a lot of theater and a moderate number of arrests.

That's mostly gone. What replaced it is what agents call "soft feet," and the Guardian's headline gives you the picture in five words: "Gone in 90 seconds: an 'invisibilized' ICE is arresting more people than ever." Small teams. Unmarked vehicles. A target comes out of his apartment in the morning and moments later he's in the back of a truck and the street is empty again. No spectacle. No crowd of protestors handed a stage. Just the arrest.

I call that good police work. Enforcement that announces itself a week in advance enforces nothing. Enforcement that shows up quietly, does the job, and leaves, enforces everything. Ask any cop.

The piece includes the usual hand-wringing, naturally. Activists don't like that families get no warning anymore, which tells you exactly what the old warning system was for. The old system worked like this: advocacy groups got tipped, they flooded the block with volunteers and cameras, the operation went sideways, and the illegal alien with three DUIs drove home free. The new system works like this: he doesn't. I know which one I'd call cruel, and it isn't the 90-second version.

Some quick jargon for readers new to this beat, straight from my own time on the job rather than the Guardian's reporting. A lot of these arrests run off detainers, which are the holds ICE files with local jails asking them to hold an illegal alien for pickup instead of releasing him back out the door. When a county honors detainers, agents don't need the doorstep visit at all. When a sanctuary county refuses, agents go find him at home, at work, or at the bus stop. Every jurisdiction that brags about non-cooperation is buying its residents more doorstep visits. That part never makes it into the activist complaints.

What I found most useful in the reporting was the confirmation of something agents have been saying for months: speed is the whole game. The faster the arrest, the safer it is for everybody, including the guy being arrested. Long operations mean crowds, confrontations, and the idiot who decides to floor it in a residential neighborhood. Ninety seconds and gone means none of that.

The Guardian clearly intended the piece as a lament. Read it as a status report instead, because that's what it is. More arrests than ever. Tactics faster and quieter than the old siege model. The quiet method is out-producing the loud one, which is why it's the method now.

The scoreboard doesn't care about the adjectives.