ICE Just Arrested 1,400 People. Here's How Many Had Criminal Charges.
Surprise, surprise: Immigration and Customs Enforcement's biggest operation to date was also a huge failure.
Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin reported on X Monday that ICE completed a massive month-long operation in Massachusetts in response to the state's sanctuary policies.
Of the 1,461 arrests made as part of Operation Patriot, only 790 individuals—or roughly 54 percent—had criminal convictions or charges. Meanwhile, 277 detainees, or about 19 percent, had received final orders of removal or deportation, though it's unclear whether there was overlap between those two groups. This disastrous sweep comes as the Trump administration sets a new quota of 3,000 ICE arrests per day, and continues to stray from its commitment to target criminals for deportation.
Fox reported that many of these arrests were so-called 'collaterals,' a strange euphemism for people whose only crime was being with an ICE target at the time of arrest. Fox said that ICE had repeatedly warned sanctuary city officials that a failure to enforce immigration policies would result in collateral arrests. According to ICE's own numbers, the agency made a minimum 394 wrongful arrests as part of Operation Patriot.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council wrote in a post on X Monday that this latest ICE sweep was even worse than April's Operation Tidal Wave in Florida, which previously held the record for ICE's largest operation with a whopping 1,120 arrests.
'Wow. Just 54% of all the people arrested during this operation had a criminal record at all. That's an even lower percent than the big Florida operation in April, where 63% had criminal history,' Reichlin-Melnick wrote. 'ICE is expanding its dragnet even more to go after people with no criminal history.'
ICE told FOX that Operation Patriot was significantly more difficult due to a lack of cooperation from local officials, and claimed that they'd encountered 'almost daily interference' from activists.
But Massachusetts officials say that ICE had failed to communicate with them. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey expressed outrage Monday after an 18-year-old student at Milford High School was arrested by ICE, just days before graduation.
'Yet again, local officials and law enforcement have been left in the dark with no heads up and no answers to their questions,' she said.
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