Iranian citizen Farzad “Tony” Toutouni, 55, was arrested in Los Angeles on Oct. 27 by ICE agents after his illegal entry into the US from Canada -- and a crime spree dating back to 1989 that includes kidnapping, robbery and extortion, authorities said.
Page T32From§Eachthe evening edition — 10 November 2026
It took ICE years to catch killers abroad, a hack to catch the ones on its own payroll.
As it ran on the front
Two press releases moved on the ICE wire this week, and both do the same work twice. In Los Angeles, agents picked up Farzad "Tony" Toutouni, an Iranian national ICE describes as driving flashy cars and partying with naked models between felonies dating back to 1989 — kidnapping, robbery, extortion. In New York, agents picked up a man ICE identifies as an illegal migrant from Uzbekistan who had admitted to murdering his girlfriend in Thailand in 2013 and was, by the agency's own account, shacking up in the city in plain sight. Both releases carry the same moral: the system finds the worst men eventually, and here is the proof, dated and bylined.
All together now — turn to the other file, the one ICE did not put out. The Washington Post spent the week going through immigration personnel records exposed in a DHS hack, and what it found is a review, not a press release: officers hired last year, fast, arrived with histories of violence and misconduct the agency's own vetting process did not catch.…
…(cont) So the agency that spent the week telling the public it finally caught two bad men who evaded capture for years is the same agency whose own paperwork says it is currently handing guns to some it never should have hired. That is not two stories. That is one agency, one vetting process, cutting both ways on the same week's mail.
In September, DHS went to X to insist, against a report to the contrary, that its officers would arrest and detain migrants regardless of criminal history — an indiscriminate mandate, stated proudly, from the same department whose hiring file now reads like the thing it was supposedly screening against. The mandate was never "find the worst men." The mandate was volume. Volume hired the men the Post found. Volume is still hiring.
The Toutouni release and the Uzbekistan release are the file ICE wants you reading. The hacked personnel records are the file that was already sitting on its own server, waiting for somebody outside the building to open it.
“They want you looking at the guy with the Lamborghinis and the one who killed his girlfriend overseas, because that's the show. Behind the curtain is a hiring binder the agency didn't choose to release — somebody hacked it — and it says the agency put guns on people it should've flagged in the first place. That's not an immigration story, that's a staffing story, and the staffing is on us.”
“Look, the system worked — we caught a guy who murdered someone overseas and a career felon with three decades of priors, that's two wins on the board. The personnel thing, sure, that's a separate matter, HR stuff, legacy hires from before current leadership — did I say current leadership? That doesn't sound like me. The point is the arrests are real, and that's what the public should focus on.”
The receipts
The illegal immigrant from Uzbekistan had been living freely in the United States, even after he admitted to murdering his girlfriend in Thailand in 2013, ICE officials said.
A Post review of records exposed in a DHS hack found that some immigration officers quickly hired last year were involved in past misconduct or criminality.
· DHS rebuts report that ICE was told only to focus on criminals from the morgue, 28 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.