The LA Times ran a piece this week claiming ICE operations in California are designed to suppress midterm voter turnout. The premise is that immigration enforcement is a voter suppression tactic. You can read the original reporting here.

Let me walk through this slowly because the LA Times apparently needs someone to.

ICE arrests illegal aliens. That is the job. It has been the job since 2003. Agents go where the aliens are. They arrest the ones with final orders of removal, the ones with criminal records, and the ones who crossed illegally and got caught. That is the mission. It is written in federal statute.

The LA Times wants readers to believe this is secretly about keeping people from voting. The problem with that theory is basic: illegal aliens cannot vote in federal elections. It is a crime. Under 18 U.S.C. 611, any alien who votes in a federal election has committed a felony. Punishable by a fine, a year in prison, or both, and then deportation.

So who exactly is ICE discouraging from voting? Citizens? Citizens are not subject to ICE enforcement. Legal permanent residents? Same answer. ICE is not setting up checkpoints outside polling places. They are arresting people who are in the country illegally, many of whom have criminal records or active deportation orders.

The LA Times knows this. Every reporter on that staff knows this. They wrote the piece anyway because the narrative matters more than the law.

I spent 26 years in the Border Patrol. I cannot count the number of times someone in the press tried to reframe a straightforward enforcement operation as something sinister. Every raid is a political stunt. Every arrest is intimidation. Every flight out of the country is a photo op. The people making these claims have never once ridden along on an operation, read a case file, or sat in a processing room while a convicted felon gets booked.

The count is the count. ICE goes where the work is. California has more illegal aliens than any state in the country, roughly 2.2 million by the latest estimates. If you are running a national enforcement operation, you are going to end up in California. You are going to end up in Los Angeles. Because of the numbers, not an election.

The LA Times piece falls apart the second you ask a follow-up question. Who is being suppressed? How? By what mechanism? The article cannot answer any of those questions because the premise is garbage.

Here is what is actually happening. ICE is doing its job. Arrests are up. Removal flights are running. Criminal aliens are being put on planes and sent home. The LA Times does not like the scoreboard, so they are trying to convince readers the game itself is illegitimate.

That is not how it works. Federal law is federal law. An election does not pause enforcement. A newspaper headline does not override statute. ICE operates every day of the year, including the days people wish they would stop.

SCOREBOARD: ICE keeps arresting. The LA Times keeps whining. Federal statute keeps standing. The count moves forward.