Sharyl Attkisson On Site with Operation Metro Surge

Summary

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Full Measure After Hours: Sharyl Attkisson On Site with Operation Metro Surge

Podcast: Full Measure After Hours
Host: Sharyl Attkisson
Episode Air Date: February 19, 2026
Episode Theme: A firsthand, behind-the-scenes look at Operation Metro Surge—Minnesota’s massive and controversial crackdown on illegal immigration—examining its implementation, impact, community response, and the broader issue of crime and statistics related to illegal immigration.

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Episode Overview

Sharyl Attkisson takes listeners inside her reporting stint with ICE as they conduct Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, the largest anti-illegal immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. She unpacks the controversy, safety concerns, impact on crime, community tensions, and offers a deep dive into crime data related to illegal immigrants, challenging commonly accepted narratives. The episode also features an on-site interview with ICE Assistant Field Director Richard Tyne.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Inside Operation Metro Surge

• Operation Scale & Controversy:
  Attkisson details the unprecedented size and controversy of Metro Surge (00:10). ICE agents specifically focused on illegal immigrants with additional criminal records, though community policies previously enabled their release without notifying ICE.
• Safety Debate:
  ICE maintains that collaboration with local jurisdictions improves safety by allowing apprehension in controlled environments, instead of risky field arrests with community tensions and potential violence (01:35).
• Escalating Confrontations:
  Lack of cooperation previously compelled ICE to conduct operations in public neighborhoods, sometimes leading to clashes with demonstrators and even violence, as “two shooting deaths” occurred during the operation (02:40).

2. Crime Data and Narrative Disputes

• Crime Rates & Representation:
  Attkisson challenges the narrative that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes, saying, “They are drastically overrepresented in our federal prisons, numbering by one official count at one in four inmates” (03:50).
  • She asserts that statistics often conflate legal and illegal immigrants, skewing data.
  • Many jurisdictions do not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants in crime data.
  • The most reliable metric, she argues, is their rate of incarceration relative to their population share.

3. On-the-Ground Interview: ICE Assistant Field Director Richard Tyne

[05:02 – 08:25]

• Daily Tactics & Adjustments:
  • Targeting and Surveillance:
    “We had targets that we had set up for the night before. We sent out teams... When we encountered people coming out... we identified them... they were either here in the country illegally or they had absconded from court proceedings. So... we brought them into custody.” (05:07 — Richard Tyne)
  • Recent Policy Changes:
    Cooperation with local counties allowed ICE to set detainers for criminal aliens in jail, enabling safer, more secure apprehensions.
    • “With cooperation from local counties and municipalities, it really does prevent any type of situations out in the field. There’s less probability of things going wrong.” (07:30 — Richard Tyne)
• Target Criteria:
  • Focus is on “criminal aliens, not ordinary illegal immigrants who are here not violating the law,” though agents will arrest any illegal immigrant encountered (07:00).
  • Examples: Targets with sexual offenses, DUIs, and other crimes.
• Community Tensions:
  • Cooperation alleviated some tension among officers but not significantly among the public. (07:58)
• Key Quote:
  • “Knowing that local counties and municipalities are here to help has definitely been something that the officers are welcoming. The temperature in the community, I think it's pretty much the same.” (07:58 — Richard Tyne)

4. Arrest Figures and Crime Impact

• Operation Outcomes:

  • “Operation Metro Surge removed more than 4,000 illegal immigrants from Minnesota’s neighborhoods.” (08:25)
  • Examples of apprehended criminals with histories of serious crimes, including murder, assault, sex crimes, and gang activity.

• Notable Criminal Case Highlights: (08:45)

  • Jose Alberto Benitez Rodriguez: “Nine counts of burglary, three counts of assault, seven illegal entries.”
  • Benvenotto Walter Lopez Alonzum: “Sexual assault charges.”
  • Mong Chang: “Convicted of two murders before he was picked up and somehow released and running loose in Minnesota...”

• National Crime Data:
  Using DHS, CBP, and other federal reports:

  • “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 Santa Fe, New Mexico.” (09:45)

  Notable Quotes & Analysis:

  • “Every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is a net crime that should not have occurred.” (15:01 — Sharyl Attkisson)

5. Historical Context & Policy Connections

• Crime Reduction Trends:

  • Attkisson draws a direct connection between ramped-up deportations in Trump's second term (540,000 nationwide) and double-digit reductions in violent crime rates in 2025, including a 21% decline in homicides.
    • “Homicides plunged 21% in 2025, the largest single-year drop on record, now the lowest since at least 1900.” (12:50)

• Incarceration Data:

  • Illegal immigrants constitute roughly 1 in 30 of the general population, yet “accounted for 1 in 5 federal prison inmates” (13:45). The official figures may be undercounts.

• Prison & Cost Stats:

  • “Federal taxpayers shelled out $15 billion [for incarcerating illegal immigrants] during that relatively short time period studied." (15:38)
  • "Of about 146,500 who finished a federal prison term, about one in six... had already been imprisoned again at least once." (16:10)

6. Border Patrol Criminal Alien Arrest Trends

• Statistical Shifts (2017-2026):
  • Criminal alien arrests by Border Patrol dropped sharply under Trump, surged under Biden, and declined again when Trump returned.
    • “2017... 8,500; 2020... down to 2,438. Then look what happens... up to 17,000 [by 2024], then back down to 8,800 in 2025.” (18:30)
    • Predicts 2026 figure will come in even lower.
  • Attkisson argues these trends are rarely discussed but vital for understanding the scope and cost of illegal immigration crime in the U.S.

7. Final Reflections and Preview

• Attkisson urges deeper public engagement with the data and discussion:
  • “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.” (20:37)
• She encourages listeners to watch her full TV report and engage critically with all sourced data.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “They are drastically overrepresented in our federal prisons, numbering by one official count at one in four inmates.”
  — Sharyl Attkisson (03:50)

• “If you're in the country illegally and we encounter you, we will take you into custody.”
  — Richard Tyne, ICE Assistant Field Director (07:21)

• “Every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is a net crime that should not have occurred.”
  — Sharyl Attkisson (15:01)

• “Homicides plunged 21% in 2025, the largest single-year drop on record, now the lowest since at least 1900.”
  — Sharyl Attkisson (12:50)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:04 – Attkisson introduces the Operation Metro Surge story and on-site reporting experience.
• 02:00 – Details about ICE’s position on local cooperation and agent safety.
• 03:30 – First breakdown of illegal immigrant crime data and discussion on statistical manipulation.
• 05:02 – Start of interview with ICE Assistant Field Director Richard Tyne.
• 08:25 – Post-interview discussion; operation arrest figures and specific criminal examples.
• 12:50 – Analysis linking enforcement actions to falling crime rates.
• 13:45 – Prison population breakdown and cost discussion.
• 18:30 – Historical border crime data and analysis of policy impact.
• 20:37 – Conclusion: call for broader engagement with these critical issues.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode delivers a detailed, on-the-ground look at the mechanics and consequences of the largest immigration crackdown in U.S. history, offering often-overlooked crime statistics and policy analysis. With firsthand reporting, exclusive interviews, and a strong editorial voice, Attkisson urges listeners to question prevailing narratives and consider the broader impact of immigration enforcement not just on crime, but on community, policy, and public debate.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hi everybody, it's Cheryl Atkison. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure after hours this week. I was on site during the last week of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, the largest and most controversial illegal immigration crackdown in US History. What a fascinating experience I just had reporting for you in Minneapolis on Operation Metro Surge, the largest crackdown on illegal immigration in US History and probably the most controversial. My crew and I got to go along with ICE agents as they fanned out into community neighborhoods looking for illegal immigrant criminals. People who entered the US Illegally have been arrested for additional crimes in Minnesota, but leading up to this operation, they were being released into their communities instead of the counties alerting ICE who would have deported them. And that's pretty much where the debate lies. ICE insists it's much safer when communities cooperate and notify them of arrests of illegal immigrants without turning the alleged criminals back into the community. They say that because Minnesota wasn't doing this, the counties were not cooperating, that ICE agents were forced to hunt down dangerous criminals and in a way that they said put agents at risk as well as protesters in the community, which drew agitators and demonstrators who can be seen on video often becoming violent, attacking and assaulting ICE agents. The agents arguing the local police were frequently doing little to nothing to keep the situation under control. So that inflamed things as well. And you probably know there were two shooting deaths as a result of all of this. Not long after that came an end to Metro Surge. In a moment, we'll talk about the number of arrests they made and then interestingly, extrapolate how many crimes may have been prevented by these arrests. This part of the conversation is frequently, if not always, lost in the news coverage and discussion. Ideally, when these types of things happen, nobody gets hurt, but ultimately the injuries and the deaths logically should be measured against the carnage prevented by removing thousands of potentially dangerous criminals from neighborhoods. You may hear, by the way, that illegal immigrants supposedly commit crimes at lower rates than US Citizens, and I won't go too, too far down that road today, as I've reported on this at length in the past. But actually, the data shows illegal immigrants and far more likely to commit serious crimes that land them in prisons than US Citizens. They are drastically overrepresented in our federal prisons, numbering by one official count at one in four inmates. Again, a General Accountability Office report put the number at 1 in 4 of the prison population, and they certainly aren't 1 in 4 of the general population. So they're again drastically overrepresented, and that's considered a possible undercount since some jails and prisons don't report or break down the numbers of illegal immigrants. So why do people keep saying that it's not true that they're committing crimes at this high rate? Well, that's because the analyses frequently conflate legal immigrants and illegal immigrants to skew the data. In other words, some of the analyses don't separate out crimes committed by illegal immigrants. They water down that number by folding in legal immigrants who are not committing crimes at such high levels. Then another statistical issue can be that many agencies simply don't call illegal immigrants illegal immigrants. So it's impossible to know the data. For example, there's some Texas research that concluded illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate. But if you look at the footnotes, they said that they tried to include rates of the offending in California as well as Texas, but that the California data did not allow the researchers to differentiate between documented and undocumented immigrant populations. Again, the blending together of both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants Wonder why? So perhaps the most reliable indicator is actually who's filling our jails and prisons. And that's where the shocking disparity is seen. Far more illegal immigrants there than there should be if they committed crimes at a proportional rate. We'll talk some hard numbers in just a moment. But first, here is my interview with ICE Assistant Field Director Richard Tyne after the ride along I did with ICE agents in Minneapolis.

[A]

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

[C]

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]

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]

That's correct.

[A]

What are the changes?

[C]

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]

Is that a better situation for the federal agents?

[C]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[C]

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

[A]

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

[C]

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]

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]

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]

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.