ICE SWEEP NETS 123, INCLUDING 13 IN AUSTIN

Eight-day operation in Central, South Texas detains 13 in Austin.

Federal officers arrested 123 people — including 13 in Austin — across Central and South Texas during an eight-day operation that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said targeted criminals.

The people taken into custody in the operation that ended Wednesday had previous criminal convictions, ICE said in a statement Friday.

The agency said 93 people had criminal histories that included convictions for aggravated assault, assault, child abuse, domestic violence, cocaine possession, fraud, drunken driving, drug trafficking, marijuana possession, illegal entry, illegal re-entry after deportation, larceny, possessing a controlled substance and weapons possession.

Thirty others were arrested on immigration violations, ICE said.

Officers arrested 13 in Austin, three in Waco, 44 in Harlingen, 27 in Laredo and 36 in San Antonio. Of those arrested, 115 were men; eight were women.

ICE also broke down the arrests by country: 102 were from Mex-

ico, 13 were from Honduras, five from Guatemala and one each from El Salvador, Jamaica and Cuba.

”This operation was focused on targeting immigration fugitives and criminal aliens,” Daniel Bible, ICE’s field office director of enforcement and removal operations in San Antonio, said in a statement.

“Public safety remains a top priority for ICE. This was a focused eight-day enforcement operation over a large area, but we routinely conduct operations daily,” Bible said.

According to ICE, “all of the targets in this operation were amenable to arrest and removal under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act.”

One detainee with an outstanding warrant for marijuana possession was turned over to the Travis County Sheriff ’s Office, “despite the fact that it refuses to honor all ICE detainers,” ICE said in its statement.

The federal agency has been at odds with Travis County authorities since Feb. 1, when Sheriff Sally Hernandez scaled back compliance with ICE requests to continue detaining inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

Hernandez has refused to hold defendants on the ICE requests, called immigration detainers, unless they are charged with crimes such as murder, aggravated sexual assault or human trafficking, though she said authorities look at individuals on a case-by-case basis, and can decide to hold them on lesser charges if deemed appropriate.

A statewide ban on such policies goes into effect Sept. 1. The new state law also punishes police chiefs and sheriffs who discourage their officers from asking detainees about their immigration status.

Asking such questions, Hernandez has argued, erodes trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities.

In January, federal officials told two magistrate judges they would target Austin in a major immigration operation dubbed “Operation Cross Check” that was, in part, retribution for Hernandez’s policy on detainers. The February operation resulted in the arrest of 51 people.

Of the 51 people arrested during the operation, 23 were previously identified by ICE as having criminal convictions, but 28 were deemed “non-criminals” by the immigration agency — meaning those people didn’t have previous criminal convictions but were suspected of being in the country illegally.