EXCLUSIVE — Illinois and Chicago authorities released more than 500 illegal immigrants from custody rather than cooperate with federal immigration officials, including people accused or convicted of violent crimes, according to a House Judiciary Committee report obtained by the Washington Examiner. The Republican-led committee’s interim…
Page T2From§Eachthe supper edition — 1 October 2026
DHS denies it only arrests criminals, ten days after insisting a criminal is a criminal.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what the Department of Homeland Security said this weekend, because there's been some confusion. A report circulated claiming ICE agents had been quietly instructed to focus enforcement only on immigrants with criminal records — a softer posture, the kind of thing that plays well in a midterm year. DHS moved fast. In a post to X, the department denied it: agents will arrest and detain illegal immigrants regardless of their criminal status. No carve-outs. No narrowing. The policy is what it has always been.
Which is not quite what the secretary said ten days earlier. On Sept. 18, asked about Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar's ad warning that enforcement had "gone too far," Secretary Markwayne Mullin didn't reach for nuance. "A criminal is a criminal," he said, framing the department's entire mission around exactly the group it now insists it doesn't single out. Ten days is not a long time to go from the criminal is the target to there is no target, just the policy, stated broadly — I mean, consistently, as policy. That's — that is the policy.…
…(cont) Then Thursday arrived with its own problem. A House Judiciary Committee staff report, Chairman Jim Jordan's, found that Illinois and Chicago released more than 500 immigrants despite active ICE detainers, among them people accused or convicted of violent crimes. Not 500 flagged as the violent ones — 500 released over a federal hold, with some of them also facing those charges. The distinction a careful reader would draw is the one the department cannot afford this week, because the whole defense of "regardless of criminal status" was that it treats everyone the same, and here are 500 people the states didn't hand over at all, criminal status notwithstanding.
Compare it to Sept. 1, when Mullin announced the surge into New York: 2,197 arrests off the street, the kind of number that reads like a victory lap.
So: the department doesn't prioritize criminals, except when the secretary says it does, except when the report says the states let them go anyway. That's consistent. That's the policy. That is — that's actually three different policies, stated inside the same ten days.
“They flip the script depending on who's in the room — tell the swing-district ad buyers it's just the violent ones, tell the base it's regardless of status, and never let the two versions sit in the same room together. The 500 people Illinois let go aren't the problem or the solution, they're the excuse the department needed the same week its own talking points stopped matching. Somebody's getting picked up off a street corner because the agency needed a headline more than it needed one policy.”
“Look, "a criminal is a criminal" isn't some radical statement, that's just Secretary Mullin being plain with people — and the department backed that up ten days later by saying status doesn't matter at all, which is, actually, hold on, that's a different sentence than the first one. It's not a different sentence, it's the same sentence. Next question.”
The receipts
· DHS rebuts report that ICE was told only to focus on criminals from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Mullin bashes Maria Elvira Salazar’s pro-immigration amnesty GOP ad: ‘A criminal is a criminal’ from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
· White House fulfills vow to surge ICE to New York, arrests 2,197 illegal immigrants from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.