Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Monday that it arrested more than 2,000 people during a five-day nationwide sweep targeting fugitive criminal aliens, including gang members and people wanted for crimes including robbery, rape, and child pornography.
The enforcement operation, officially dubbed "Operation Cross Check," targeted "the worst of the worst criminals," Deputy Homeland Security Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday.
Of the 2,059 arrested, nearly half had felony convictions for crimes that included robbery, kidnapping, child pornography, manslaughter, and rape.
In all, 89 were convicted sex offenders and 58 were known gang members. Nearly one-quarter of those arrested had re-entered the United States after having been previously deported.
The arrestees came from 94 different countries and 163 of the cases will be presented to the U.S. Attorney's Office for prosecution. These include a Polish citizen convicted in Connecticut for cocaine possession, a Jamaican man in Atlanta convicted of multiple offenses including assault with a deadly weapon on a law enforcement officer, and a Finnish citizen in Illinois convicted of possessing child pornography.
Some of the other people arrested included a Filipino woman in Pennsylvania who had been convicted on child pornography charges; a native of Poland who had been convicted of sexual exploitation of a minor and had been required to register as a sex offender; and a Mexico native arrested at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home who had been convicted of perpetrating a sex offense against a child,
WDEL Radio in Wilmington reported.
CNN reported that the sting operation was the fifth by ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2011. Thus far, these operations had resulted in the arrest of 13,124 fugitives.
Overall, however, the number of criminal deportations from the U.S. interior has declined by 43 percent since 2012, falling from 153,000 to 87,000. The decline has taken place despite an increase in the number of criminal aliens identified by ICE.
That increase has occurred primarily as a result of ICE's "Secure Communities" program, which screens the fingerprints of aliens arrested by state and local police. The program, while popular with local law enforcement agencies, was dismantled by President Obama's executive amnesty actions in November,
according to the Center for Immigration Studies.