The paperwork doesn't care who you cheered for. Samuel Sey, a conservative Christian blogger who has spent years publicly backing immigration enforcement, was arrested by ICE last week, according to MSN.

Sey is a Ghanaian-Canadian writer who comments on faith and culture. He's been open about supporting ICE on his blog and social media. He's argued for strong borders more than once. Then the agency he defended showed up and took him into custody.

I spent 26 years in the Border Patrol. Every agent knows this: nobody runs a name through a sympathy filter before acting. If you're in the country illegally, you're on the board, whether you blog for the agency or against it. Enforcement isn't a fan club. Nobody gets a loyalty discount.

Details are thin. The report doesn't give the charge or Sey's current immigration status, and ICE hasn't put out a release with the particulars. We know the arrest happened. We know Sey's own writing made the irony impossible to miss. His supporters spent the day online asking how this could happen to someone on their side. Simple answer: the law doesn't have a side.

That's how it should work, frankly. I've said for years that an arrest is an arrest. When I read about a jam, I want three things: the alien's status, the charge, and the removal timeline. Who the person voted for, prayed with, or posted about never made it into my notebook. The count is the count.

There's a lesson here for everybody, and I'll keep it clean of politics. If you're in the country without lawful status, no amount of public support for enforcement protects you. ICE's job is to find people who are deportable and remove them. The agency runs on statutes and detainers, not goodwill. A detainer doesn't come with a comments section.

Plenty of outlets will run this as a gotcha story. I find that tiresome. The implication is that ICE betrayed a friend. Nonsense. The machine runs the same for everyone it touches, which is the only fair way for a law enforcement agency to operate. I'd be more bothered by the opposite: an agency that looked the other way for people who said nice things about it.

Watch for the follow-up. Either ICE has a removable offense and a charge, or this gets sorted out in front of a judge. Either way, I'll be tracking it. The story isn't finished until the disposition is on paper.

Supporter of the agency or not, Sey is a name in the system like any other. The scoreboard doesn't record opinions.