Overview
- An anonymously leaked 15-page file marked law enforcement sensitive lists 21 major ICE operations and reports 6,852 apprehensions since June.
- Operation Benchwarmer embeds plainclothes personnel in transport vans, sally ports, processing areas, and detention cells, deploying over 2,000 intelligence assets that produced more than 2,000 contacts, 492 prosecutorial leads, and 135 identified stash houses.
- Operation Abracadabra requires interviewing 100% of detainees to gather intelligence, with an explicit aim of generating links to foreign terrorist or transnational criminal groups and developing follow-on targets tracked in ICE systems.
- Other named efforts include Operation Tidal Wave in Florida, which recorded 1,120 arrests with 63 percent involving people who had prior criminal records, as well as programs labeled Fleur De Lis and Dust Off.
- The materials were provided to journalist Ken Klippenstein by a Border Patrol official who cited secrecy and lack of congressional oversight, with reporting also describing concern inside DHS, the FBI, and the Justice Department, including reported prosecutor resignations in Minnesota.