You might have seen that Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, in Louisiana for the Operation Catahoula Crunch effort to deport criminals and other illegal aliens, said his task force has passed the 350 arrests mark…

Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino said nearly 350 people have been arrested during Operation Catahoula Crunch, an immigration enforcement operation in Louisiana.

Bovino updated the arrest numbers on social media Tuesday morning, saying the total is close to 350 arrests.

The Border Patrol chief has been in the New Orleans area for more than a week as part of the immigration crackdown in Louisiana.

That represents a fairly low figure, which makes sense because Bovino’s outfit is focusing on “high-value” targets, specifically cartel thugs and others on a list of criminal foreigners here illegally who need to be sent home.

But it’s funny – when you have an illegal criminal on a list and you acquire intelligence on where he (or sometimes she) is, and you go there, it’s not uncommon that there will be other illegals with him.

And it’s ICE and the Border Patrol’s job to deport the other illegals, too.

The local media has made a very big deal about how Catahoula Crunch has generated “fear” among the immigrant community. This is perplexing, because there is no reason for someone who is here legally to fear the presence of ICE as they seek to deport illegal aliens and particularly those responsible for criminal activity.

To an extent, as we’ve noted, this is an example of the media in Baton Rouge and New Orleans congratulating themselves for having spread irrational fear in the immigrant community. And that’s not a particularly good look for them seeing as though an expectation we might have of a responsible media would be that it would allay irrational fear by stating facts.

But that doesn’t generate a maximum amount of clicks, does it? Not compared to shouty videos of hysterical women blowing a gasket at ICE officers doing their jobs, or tight shots of “protesters” demonstrating against Border Patrol “brutality” when a wider shot reveals the tiny little crowd of losers those demonstrations have actually drawn.

I saw one news report out of New Orleans which consisted of a location shot of no more than 10 people at a protest. Ten! You could literally round up ten friends to protest anything and these people would send out a camera crew to cover it and put it on the 10 o’clock news.

Except you can’t. You can only do that if your cause is on the list of things feeding The Narrative.

Well, here’s some truth for the local media and the reality-averse activist crowd: Bovino said the goal was to make 5,000 arrests by the end of this operation, so the 350 they’ve made so far is but a drop in the well.

But here’s what’s fun: since November, the mass deportation effort in Louisiana has blown the doors off the “immigrant community,” insofar as that community is made up of illegals…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested and deported nearly 15,000 in November, according to newly released figures.

The New Orleans Field Office said in a post on X it had arrested 2,824 illegal immigrants and deported 11,870, in one of America’s many “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

The Epoch Times reports, “Among the arrested were gang members, including two from Tren de Aragua and five from MS-13. Both transnational organizations were designated as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists by the State Department in February. In addition, 11 members from other gangs were arrested as well.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it had also arrested more than 250 criminal illegal immigrants since the launch of Operation Catahoula Crunch on 3 December.

“For too long, the sanctuary policies of New Orleans have endangered the lives of the citizens and visitors of its beautiful city,” DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said.

“It is asinine that the very politicians elected to serve the great people of New Orleans have allowed gang members, repeat offenders, sex criminals, and violent abusers to walk their streets and terrorize their citizens.

“DHS will continue arresting these scumbags until every criminal illegal alien has been removed from the streets of New Orleans.”

This is a lot bigger than Catahoula Crunch, as those numbers would show.

And ICE’s claimed deportations  would include a decent number of self-deportations, since if you’re an illegal you can actually go on an app, collect $1,000 and a plane ticket home and self-deport. Doing that is a good idea because it preserves the opportunity to return here legally and then maybe get on a path to citizenship. If ICE has to come and physically deport you, that opportunity is gone.

How come it’s the Epoch Times reporting this and not the New Orleans Times-Picayune or Fox 8? One wonders. Could it be that if people knew ICE and the Border Patrol could get rid of 15,000 illegals in a little over a month just by showing up and getting on TV making arrests in the New Orleans area they could displace 15,000 people who don’t belong here, they might be aghast at how awash in illegals this place is?

We generally don’t think of Louisiana as having all that big an illegal alien problem. That’s a Texas, Illinois, California or New York thing. It isn’t really our thing.

And yet ICE can run off 15,000 in a month, including 350 arrests of gangbangers and cartel thugs?

The local media won’t report this because then people would recognize it’s a problem. And then they’d recognize the effects of the problem – on insurance rates, on housing costs, on access to education and  healthcare, on crime and on lots of other quality-of-life metrics.

Then they’d go looking for somebody to blame for causing that problem. And if they did that, the political side the legacy corporate media shills for wouldn’t come off so well, now would they?

You are allowed to be very, very irritated at these people. Mostly because that irritation has just begun. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet on these ICE arrests.