ICE Completes Crackdown on Gangs: Arrested 445 Foreign Nationals



Over the past six weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents engaged in the largest Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) enforcement surge ever attempted against criminal gangs. According to an ICE press release, the operation targeted “gang members and associates involved in transnational criminal activity, including drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, human smuggling and sex trafficking, murder and racketeering.”

The operation was highly successful, leading to 1,378 total arrests, including 445 non-citizen foreign nationals. Of those, 222 were members of the highly dangerous, foreign-based MS-13 or Sureños gangs. In addition, three of the suspects previously received deferred action under former President Obama’s controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

According to ICE, immigration officials and law enforcement have now arrested more than 7,300 MS-13 members since the onset of “Operation Community Shield” in 2005. The vast majority of these members are criminal aliens

During the campaign season, President Trump promised to crack down on illegal immigration, especially criminal illegal aliens. He especially drew a hard line on gang members, saying, “All illegal aliens in gangs should be apprehended and deported.” He also promised to empower and expand ICE, including a call to triple the number of ICE agents on or near the border.

Embarking on the largest-ever HSI effort against illegal aliens is certainly a strong step toward keeping that promise. It also shows that cooperation between immigration officials and local law enforcement produces results that make Americans safer. “Our efforts to dismantle gangs are much more effective in areas where partnership with local law enforcement is strongest,” noted ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan. Cities and congressional leaders that support “sanctuary city” policies should take note of these successful partnerships.

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9 Comments

  1. avatar

    There’s an article in the latest Harper’s magazine about a tuberculosis outbreak in Alabama. No mention of the fact that immigration both legal and illegal has contributed greatly to the problem. In 2014 the Center for Disease Control said that 66% of active TB cases in the US were among the foreign born. Nor is that just illegals, over which we have no control when they slip in unchecked. Obviously they bring in a lot, but the rate among resettled refugees, those people supposedly “vetted”, is close to a quarter of them in some populations, particularly Somalis.

    The country set a goal in the late 1980s to wipe out TB by 2010, which is an impossible goal with more people bringing it in. Obama was rattling on a couple weeks ago about how some of the people who entered through Ellis Island didn’t always have their “papers in order”. Which is nonsense, since anyone suspected of a disease like TB was turned around and sent back.

    Of course, the media is never going to point out the many diseases being brought in by foreigners. It’s racist to even mention it. A couple weeks ago, there was a supposed racist incident at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, with a black student allegedly finding a racist note on her windshield. The usual coast to coast press dust up followed with demands for change and cancelled classes. Now that it has turned out, yet again for the umpteenth time, to be a hoax, the media fails to give the same attention as they did to the original charges.

  2. avatar
    Arland (AJ) Metzger on

    Add more Border Patrol Agents and Lets Get to Building That Damn Wall!

    • avatar
      Bill Wright on

      It is time that we establish “safe zones in Mexico and provide Mexicans with guns to defend themselves and their families.

  3. avatar
    The Old Chip on

    How many of these ILLEGAL aliens, or “Honest, Hardworking, and looking for a better life, immigrants” as obama and his liberal gang would have us believe, are immediately back in the country?
    80% of those ordered deported are still in the country under some sort of sheltering appeal process and need to go, NOW. Only 3 of 10 even bother to show up for their immigration hearing. Did we notice that 3 of these ILLEGAL alien miscreants were under obama’s ILLEGAL DACA executive order that president Trump said he would recind?
    Inject ILLEGAL aliens with an RFID tag so it would trigger alarms when they ILLEGALLY reenter.
    Build the Wall.

    • avatar

      Old chip……the ones that got caught are not the honest hardworking you smarty!!!

  4. avatar

    Continue to nail these bas—– and dispose of them. I want Trump and Sessions to kick *** and take names to the max. Bravo. Time to Make America Great (and real) Again! Way overdue.