DHS Says It Arrested 2,197 People Across New York in 33 Days. It Would Not Say How Many Had Violent Convictions.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood in New York City on Tuesday and declared the end of "Operation Rotten Apple," a month-long Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that the department says produced 2,197 arrests across New York State between July 27 and Aug. 29.

Mullin described the people taken into custody as "the worst criminals" in the state, listing murderers, rapists, child sex offenders, drug traffickers and violent assailants. He did not release a breakdown showing how many of the 2,197 had convictions in any of those categories, how many had convictions of any kind, and how many were arrested on civil immigration violations alone. Reporters at the news conference asked; federal officials did not provide the figures.

That gap matters because the national picture points the other way. Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that 70.6% of the 65,765 people held in ICE detention nationwide as of July had no criminal conviction at all. The TRAC figure describes the overall detention population rather than this specific operation, but it is the only systematic accounting available, and DHS has declined for months to publish conviction data operation by operation.

Most of Mullin's remarks were political rather than statistical. He said the surge was launched specifically because of who runs New York. "Operation Rotten Apple was initiated because New York City has a liberal, socialist mayor who, instead of working with law enforcement, tried to cut NYPD's budget by $22 million and refused to cooperate with federal law enforcement," Mullin said. "You also have a governor who refuses to work with us. Over the last 30 days, Operation Rotten Apple has taken over 2,100 of the worst criminals off our streets statewide." Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul have both defended New York's sanctuary statutes, which sharply limit when local police and corrections officials may honor ICE detainers.

The operation is the latest in a series of named, city-specific ICE surges the administration has run since returning to office, each one announced in the jurisdiction it targets and each one framed around local Democratic officials. The pattern has drawn objections from police executives in several of the affected cities, who argue that federal enforcement conducted in and around courthouses, schools and workplaces suppresses crime reporting by immigrant witnesses and victims regardless of the arrestees' records.

New York's congressional delegation has requested the underlying arrest data. Until DHS produces it, the only public accounting of who was swept up in the largest immigration operation the state has seen this year is a number and an adjective.