During the course of a weeklong operation, officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and removal officers in Houston made 422 arrests of individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants.
The operation targeted some of the most dangerous criminals, including one illegal immigrant who was wanted in Colombia on charges of murder. ICE officials were responsible for carrying out the operation.
For a period of ten hours, Fox News was infiltrated with authorities while they captured an illegal alien who they claim is sought for murder in Colombia. The arrest took place at the apartment complex where the individual was staying.
“He was sentenced to 21 years in Colombia for a homicide conviction,” said Bret Bradford, the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Houston. “He was released after being assigned a court date for an immigration hearing in February of 2024, after having entered the United States illegally in February of the same year. A judge in charge of immigration matters in the United States issued an order to remove him from the country in March of this year because he did not appear in court for the scheduled date.
“The most important thing to me is the safety of the general public,” stated Bradford.
According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), out of the 422 arrests, 262 will have criminal convictions, 34 will have pending convictions, 126 will have additional immigration offenses, and 229 will have final orders of removal.
A migrant from Mexico who was 72 years old and had been convicted of homicide, robbery, stealing, and assault was another illegal alien who was removed during the operation. This individual was forced to leave the United States after being ordered to do so in 2018.
During the operation, a criminal alien from Mexico who had been deported twice to the United States was seen attempting to leave in his vehicle and then on foot before he was eventually apprehended. He was forty years old. Hector Castillo-Garcia was found guilty of multiple counts while he was in the United States unlawfully, including arson, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and driving while intoxicated, as stated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
The ICE Field Office in Houston has an operation center that is staffed with analysts who are solely responsible for developing these targets.
“They are doing the database research to get the worst of the worst, the ones who have the most significant threat to public safety,” Bradford explained to reporters. “And then we want to look at the information that we have on that individual, make sure that it is a legitimate target, make sure that we have good addresses, and then go out and conduct surveillance so that we can see if we can establish a pattern of the subjects’ movements and activity. This means that we want to try to combine the worst of the worst with the individuals that we have the highest probability of coming across and arresting. In other words, we want to try to combine the two things in order to come up with the most desirable targets.
Moreover, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is stepping up its efforts to remove illegal migrants by expeditiously transporting those who have been issued final removal orders to designated hubs, where they are brought back to their countries of origin without delay.
According to the ICE field director, this “hub and spoke” mechanism, which speeds up the removal process, has just lately begun to be used.
“We can arrest the individual this morning, process him this afternoon, and have him on a removal flight this evening, same day, saving taxpayer cost and just making it more efficient and expedited process to get these folks out of the country,” Bradford explained to reporters.
In Houston, eighty inmates boarded one of the flights that were destined for the hub in El Paso, Texas, according to footage that was obtained exclusively by Fox News.