Last week, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told a House Judiciary subcommittee that Homeland Security’s summer arrests had crossed a line. “For the first time this summer,” she said, “the majority of people that DHS arrested were people who pose absolutely no threat to public safety,” and ICE arrests of people with criminal convictions had “decreased, not increased.”
Her office has argued that arrests of aliens with no U.S. convictions or pending charges have surged 770 percent, that ICE is chasing “parents, longtime friends, neighbors,” and that shifting Homeland Security Investigations agents onto “street sweeps” and “random traffic stops” makes America less safe, not more. She has pressed that case against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as the administration touts record interior arrests.
Ersi Zeron is the answer to that argument.
Zeron, a Honduran national in the country illegally and suspected of gang ties, was not pulled off a most-wanted poster in Brooklyn. He was stopped for speeding and driving without a license in Tennessee. That is exactly the kind of encounter Jayapal treats as proof that ICE has abandoned the “worst of the worst.”
Then officers ran a check with local law enforcement and learned he was wanted in Honduras for a 2016 shooting massacre at a billiard hall. He had entered at the Calexico West Port of Entry in September 2022—the dark days of the Biden border invasion—and was released into the United States.
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