Three thousand a day. That's the number ICE leadership put in front of the agency this week, according to a report relayed by Cuba Headlines, citing CNN. The directive came down verbally on Tuesday: increase daily arrests.

Verbal directives are how this stuff actually moves in an agency like ICE. Nothing gets memo'd until the numbers start moving. A supervisor tells a field office director, the director tells the group supervisors, and within a day or two the street teams are reworking their target lists. I sat through 26 years of those briefings in Tucson. When the number goes up, the operation changes shape fast.

My read on the ramp, and I want to be clear this is my read, not something in the reporting: a number like 3,000 a day nationally means every field office running sustained operations seven days a week, with deep target decks and enough bed space and flight capacity to move that many bodies out the back end. The back end is the part nobody in the press ever asks about, so I will. Arresting 3,000 people a day is one thing. Processing them, housing them, and getting them in front of an immigration judge or onto a removal flight is the real lift. The math works out to roughly 90,000 arrests a month, and I don't believe the system has ever sustained a clip like that. If it gets close, records fall. I enjoy watching a record fall.

Where do the arrests come from? That's the question, from where I sat for 26 years. At-large arrests in the interior are the hardest and most labor-intensive way to do this. Worksite operations, jail detainers, and targeted sweeps against criminal aliens are where the volume lives. The flooding-a-region model scales. Door-knocking one address at a time does not.

Expect the usual chorus to start wailing about quotas any minute now. The argument goes that a numeric target forces agents to grab whoever's handy instead of the worst offenders. I heard that line for two decades and it was wrong every time. Agents work target lists. The list is built from criminal history, prior removal orders, and overstay data. A higher number means more lists get worked, faster. The guy standing at the bus stop with no record doesn't become the priority.

The scoreboard says 3,000 a day is the new target. Let's see how close they get by month's end.