DHS sent over 200 Border Patrol agents into New Orleans under an operation named, with a certain regional flair, "Catahoula Crunch" — CBP commander-at-large Greg Bovino personally overseeing it, the agency's chief saying agents will stay "until the mission's accomplished." It's the latest in a pattern that now includes Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and New Orleans: Border Patrol, an agency built and funded for the physical border, deployed instead to Democratic-controlled interior cities hundreds of miles from it.
DHS says the operation targets violent offenders — the framing that makes an operation like this politically saleable, and the framing I'd actually support if it held up. But the reporting on the ground says otherwise: many of those actually detained look like day laborers and tradesmen, not the violent criminal population the operation was announced to pursue. That gap, between the stated target and the people actually swept up, is not a minor implementation detail. It's the entire question of whether an operation is enforcement or theater.
I want criminal illegal aliens who've committed violent crimes removed, and I don't think that's a controversial position even among people who disagree with me on everything else in this newsletter. What I don't want is an agency built for border interdiction running roving operations in interior cities where the actual arrest data doesn't match the stated mission — because that's not targeted enforcement, it's a numbers exercise dressed in the language of public safety, and it burns political credibility that real enforcement against actual violent offenders needs to survive.
Every time an operation like this gets announced as "violent offenders" and executed as "whoever's easiest to find," it makes the next legitimate operation harder to defend, because the public has learned, correctly, not to trust the stated target. If DHS wants sustained public support for interior enforcement, the fastest way to lose it is exactly this: say violent criminals, arrest day laborers, and hope nobody checks the numbers.