“Operation Rotten Apple did what sanctuary politicians in New York City and the state of New York refuse to do: made the Empire State safer,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said.
Page A6From§Eachthe noon edition — 1 September 2026
Boebert warns surveillance on every corner is not freedom; ICE runs it across New York anyway.
As it ran on the front
I wrote this down, hold on, I know it's in here somewhere. Here — 'Surveillance On Every Corner Is Not Freedom.' Congresswoman Boebert's own words, printed plain in the Daily Caller. I read that line maybe four times before I noticed the word doing all the heavy lifting. Freedom. Not privacy, not liberty, not even the Constitution — freedom. I circled it.
Now, I've got this old padlock in my kitchen drawer, the kind you'd put on a shed. My wife keeps it there for the bikes. Two positions: locked, unlocked. That's it. No in-between corner where the lock is 'sort of' watching you. A corner's either covered or it isn't. That's the whole demonstration, really — I don't need much more than a padlock to make the point, and I think that's the point Boebert was making too, in her way.…
…(cont) So then I turn the page, and here's the New York Post, same stretch near as I can tell: 'ICE nabs over 2K illegal migrants across NY in Operation Rotten Apple.' Across NY. Not one neighborhood, not one precinct — across. Two thousand and change, the story says, arrested, tracked, processed. That's a lot of corners covered, by my count. I wrote 'across NY' next to 'every corner' in the margin and just sat with it a minute.
I'm not an expert in surveillance policy, I want to say that up front — I'm just a fella with a notebook and a padlock. But when one member of a party says every corner being watched is the opposite of freedom, and the operation her own side runs covers, by the paper's own count, thousands of people across an entire state, I start wondering which corner she meant. Maybe she meant a different kind of corner. Maybe there's a corner where the watching is freedom and a corner where it isn't, and somebody drew that line somewhere, and I just haven't found the page yet.
Excuse me — before you go — does 'every corner' in her statement include the corners Operation Rotten Apple already covered, or not?
I'll be here. I've got the whole notebook.
“Boebert's out here clutching her pearls about surveillance while her own side runs a dragnet across an entire state — that's not a contradiction, that's a brand, folks. The 'freedom' talk is for you, the corner-watching is for them, and you're supposed to never notice it's the same corner. Two thousand people got swept up and the congresswoman's still worried about the cameras.”
“Look, Operation Rotten Apple is targeted enforcement against people the story itself says includes serious offenders, that's just public safety, that's not blanket surveillance — did I say blanket? I meant targeted, very targeted, two thousand targeted individual — okay it's across the entire state of New York, but every one of those is a separate case file, technically.”
The receipts
‘Protect public safety without surrendering the right to live unmonitored lives’
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.