Two days ago I wrote up the arrest of Samuel Sey, the evangelical blogger and podcast host ICE detained despite his very public backing of the agency. I figured the story would generate some mail. It has. The fallout is now its own story, and MSN is covering the uproar among people who spent years cheering every arrest and now want an exception made for one of their own.

I'll say what I said in my first piece, because it hasn't changed. If you are in the country illegally, you are on the table. That was the policy when I wore the uniform and it's the policy now. Nobody at ICE runs a loyalty check before the cuffs go on. Agents work off a docket, and the docket doesn't care who you voted for, who you pray to, or how many agents you praised on a podcast.

The blindness is the point. The alternative is an enforcement system that makes exceptions for people with an audience, and I promise you that system looks a lot worse than this one.

Sey's supporters are arguing he's a good man, a Christian voice, an ally. All of that may be true. None of it is a legal status. I arrested people in Tucson who cried, people who prayed, people whose families swore up and down they were the finest illegal aliens you'd ever meet. The paperwork doesn't have a column for character references. That was true under every administration, and pretending otherwise now, because the man in custody shares your politics, is exactly the kind of selective outrage the open-borders crowd runs on. I don't like watching the right borrow the left's playbook.

There's a fair question buried in the noise, and it's the same one I raised in my October 27 piece: what was the basis for the detention, and does he have a pending case or not? If DHS has the goods, the supporters will have to live with it. If they don't, the process will sort it out, same as it does for everyone else. Either way, the answer doesn't come from a hashtag campaign.

The larger point stands. Enforcement only works when it's blind. The day ICE starts releasing people because their friends are loud enough, every advocacy group in the country will get louder overnight. You think the detainer game in New York is bad now, wait until sympathy becomes a get-out-of-custody card.

For the record, I've got no gripe with Sey's writing and I wish the man a fair process. I've also got no sympathy for the notion that the rules should bend because he was on our side of the argument.

Scoreboard: one arrest, one angry base, one agency that didn't flinch. The count doesn't play favorites.