A (5:02)

Again, can you summarize what we did today? This morning? This was a typical morning out.

C (5:07)

Yes. So what would happen this morning was we had targets that we had set up for the night before. We sent out teams to go out and surveil those targets. At that time, when we encountered people that were coming out of those target locations, we identified them. Turned out that they were either here in the country illegally or they had absconded from their court proceedings. So at that point in time, we brought them into custody.

A (5:29)

This is the first full week of changes after the border czar home and made some announcements and said he got some cooperation from the locals and withdrew 700 federal agents.

C (5:40)

That's correct.

A (5:41)

What are the changes?

C (5:42)

So what we're doing now is we have some cooperation from the local counties. So that means that we can draw back on that aspect as far as field teams. But now we're having people assigned to our criminal alien program, which is where we lay detainers, requesting for them to hold them until we can come pick them up from the local county jails.

A (6:02)

Is that a better situation for the federal agents?

C (6:05)

Absolutely. That is a situation where it's less dangerous for our officers. They can go to a controlled environment, it's secure, and then we can secure the person and get them back to our facility for processing.

A (6:18)

We saw protesters out today. They didn't impede in any physical way with the officers. Were these changes brought about because of the interactions and the shootings with the protesters?

C (6:30)

The changes were brought about because we were getting a cooperation that we were seeking, which was to go out into the field and go after targets that we had already missed. And now we can focus on the targets that are going into the jail and getting them in a secure environment and then go out to get the ones that we missed when that wasn't happening.

A (6:48)

With the cooperation, the people you picked up when we were out in the field today, you were still targeting criminal aliens, not ordinary illegal immigrants who are here not violating the law.

C (7:00)

That's correct. That was. Our targets today range from we have a person that is out there who has sexual offenses. We had people that were out there for DUIs. These are all part of our targets that we had for this morning.

A (7:14)

But still, if you run into somebody who's not committed additional crimes here, you will pick up that illegal immigrant as well.

C (7:21)

That's correct. If you're in the country illegally and we encounter you, we will take you into custody.

A (7:27)

Anything else you'd like to add, what you'd like people to know?

C (7:30)

I just want people to know that with the cooperation from the local counties and municipalities, it really does prevent any type of situations out in the field. There's less probability of things going wrong. So we appreciate that cooperation. We're looking forward to that. To continue.

A (7:50)

You haven't been here that long, but have you gotten any sense from other people here that tensions have eased in the past week or so?

C (7:58)

I would say that knowing that the local counties and the local municipalities are here to help has definitely been something that the officer are welcoming. As far as the tensions in the community and the temperature there, I think it's pretty much the same. I don't think there's been any turndown in that.

B (8:25)

As promised, some hard stats now, Operation Metro Surge removed more than 4,000 illegal immigrants from Minnesota's neighborhoods. Lots of examples were put out. In one day, a release discussed 13 men said to be active gang members from Mexico, Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Burma, Thailand and El Salvador, all roaming Minnesota streets after allegedly committing drug crimes, arson, sexual and weapons offenses, robbery and kidnapping. Some of the examples include a guy named Jose Alberto Benitez. Rodriguez. Nine counts of burglary, three counts of assault, seven illegal entries. A guy named Benvenotto Walter Lopez Alonzum. Sexual assault charges in his case. Dionisio Carbajal Escobar. Seven drug convictions, 13 illegal reentries. It's like there's a turnstile at the border. And at least four pending charges, including a felony weapons offense. A guy named Jose Miguel Reyes Hovel was also arrested. He'd been convicted of one murder and arrested for another. And then another notable Mong Chang, a guy convicted of two murders before he was picked up and somehow released and running loose in Minnesota before the ICE agents arrested him. Nationally, since 2000, if you look at Customs and Border Protection data, Department of Homeland Security data, the General Accountability Office, and Texas Department of Public Safety dps, the official data indicates illegal immigrants have committed somewhere around 5 million serious crimes. 200,000 robberies, 100,000 rapes or sexual assaults, 30,000 murders, equivalent to the population of of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some examples include the 2007 triple murder in Newark, New Jersey by these illegal immigrant gang members from Peru and Nicaragua. Those are MS.13 members who robbed and assaulted their three victims in a schoolyard and then executed them. There's Another example, a 2008 triple murder of a father and two sons, the Bologna family, in California by an illegal immigrant gang member from El Salvador who was shielded from deportation before these murders after he had been prior arrested for things shielded by San Francisco sanctuary city policies. There's the 2015 quadruple murder spree in North Carolina that involves several people, including a gang member named Emmanuel Jesus Rangel Hernandez, who'd been mistakenly granted amnesty under President Obama. And then the 2023 murder of five people in cut and Shoot, Texas by a man named Francisco Oropesa. He's an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been deported five times. You don't hear about these on the news so much during Trump's second term. So far, federal officials report about 540,000 deportations nationwide. And interestingly, I think that coincides with this remarkable drop in crime. Could it be related? It seems like there's no way there's not some relationship violent crimes in 2025, like robbery, aggravated assault, gun assaults and carjackings, all down double digits from the year before. Homicides plunged 21% in 2025, the last, the largest single year drop on record now, the lowest since at least 1900. To think that this sudden drop the year that President Trump takes his second term and begins this crackdown, to think that it's unrelated to the illegal immigration crackdown, I think doesn't make a lot of sense. I talked a few minutes ago about the number of illegal immigrants in our prison population. From my earlier reporting and writings, I was going to go over a few of those numbers. At the time I wrote the article, the US population was about 328 million. And it was estimated then that about 11 million or 1 in 30 was illegal immigrants. This is before the Biden surge in illegal immigration. So at the time, about 1 in 30 illegal immigrants. But criminal aliens accounted for 1 in 5 of federal prison inmates. Actually a little bit over 1 in 5. And it had been 1 in 4 previously, just in the most recent analysis before that. So even assuming a pretty radical margin of error for the sake of argument, it would still mean illegal immigrants were drastically overrepresented among the criminal population. I mean drastically. And, and the actual picture we know may be far worse because the government said in this analysis that there's really no way to be notified of all imprisoned illegal immigrants. So all we get is a subset of them that are learned about through identifiers such as an FBI number. So going from this GAO report, at the time there were about 91% of federal criminal aliens were citizens of Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Colombia or Guatemala. There were more than 730,000 criminal aliens in US or state prisons and local jails during the period measured. They accounted for 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses. The numbers according to GAO 197,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons arrested 1.4 million times for 2 million offenses between 2011 and 2016. There were an additional 533,000 illegal immigrants in state and local facilities between 2010 and 2015, representing 3.5 million arrests for 5.5 million offenses. We don't have more recent data from GAO because as far as I can tell, this was the last time they conducted that analysis. For some reason anyway, the arrests that they found included allegations of more than a million drug crimes by the illegal immigrants, a half million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses, 24,200 kidnappings. Even more serious, the imprisoned illegal immigrants over a five year period had been arrested for 33,300 homicide related offenses and 1500 terrorism related crimes. Another thing that seems to be lost in the discussion when we even try to compare the rate of illegal immigrant crime compared to US citizen crime is the fact that every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is a net crime that should not have occurred. It's not A matter of whose presence in this country is creating more havoc. It's that all of the illegal immigrant crimes shouldn't be happening at all. And by the way, there is a huge cost in terms of what you and I are paying just looking at the cost of keeping criminal aliens behind bars in federal, state and local facilities. Federal taxpayers shelled out $15 billion during that relatively short time period studied. 15, $15 billion. Many of these illegal immigrants are repeat offenders here in the US of about 146,500 who finished a federal prison term, about one in six of them had already been imprisoned again at least once. A huge problem that just doesn't get enough attention in the discussion, in my view. Now, the last statistics under the category of this just in, we're going to talk about arrests of individuals with criminal convictions by U.S. border Patrol. This is slightly different. We're not talking about ice. We're talking about Border Patrol agents who encounter illegal immigrants or criminal aliens and how many crimes they had been convicted of, whether in the United States or abroad previously prior to them getting caught, this time by U.S. border Patrol. And just for interest, we're looking at trends between 2017 and 2025. So U.S. border Patrol, criminal alien arrests, arrests again of people who'd been previously convicted here in the US or in their own countries. And that was on record in fiscal year 2017, that number was 8,500. It went down a little in 2018 to 6,700. In 2019, went down to 4,200. So again during Trump 1, these numbers are going down, down, down 2020 down to 2,438. So again from 8,500 to 2,400. Then look what happens when Biden comes into office. It goes up from 2,438 to interdictions of criminal aliens, interdictions and arrests by border patrol from 2,438 to 10,763. By 2022, it's 12,000, above 12,000. By 2023, it's above 15,000. By 2024, it's above 17,000. It's just gone up and up. And then last year, President Trump takes office and it starts going back down again, down to 8,800 about where it was in 2017. And trend so far, fiscal year 2026, which began a couple of months ago, looks like it's going to be down again this year. All of this is to say there are lots and lots of crimes and costs when it comes to illegal immigration in the United States, and for some reason that part of the discussion has really been minimized in recent years. And yet it's so important and impacting in some way every one of us. I hope you'll watch out for my Full report Sunday, February 22 on full measure. To find out where you can watch, you can go to cherylakkeson.com and click the Full Measure tab for a list of stations and times. Or you can always watch at FullMeasure News. We post the program on Sundays we around 10:00am Eastern Time after it's aired on TV. If you're listening to this after February 22nd, don't worry, you can always go to FullMeasure News and watch replays anytime. Or look for it on our unadvertised YouTube channel, full measure with Cheryl Atkison. I sure hope you enjoy today's podcast and that you will consider leaving us a great review, sharing it with your friends and subscribing. And check out my other podcast, the Cheryl Akison Podcast. My latest bestseller, More relevant than ever. Follow the Science How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails do your own research. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself.