Oklahoma Recruited 14 Other States to Crack Down on Illegal Immigrant Truckers at Once, and a 72-Hour Sweep Led to More Than 230 Arrests
Oklahoma's safety commissioner says drivers were told online to divert around his state, so he asked other states to enforce at the same time. More than 40 of those arrested held commercial licenses. The details are officials' accounts.
More than a dozen Republican-led states coordinated a crackdown on illegal immigrant truck drivers, so the drivers could not avoid law enforcement by rerouting through a neighboring state, The Daily Wire reports.
Why they coordinated. Tim Tipton, commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, said at a Monday news conference that once troopers began targeting illegal truckers alongside federal authorities, social media posts appeared telling foreign drivers to "divert" and avoid Oklahoma. "So we reached out to 14 other states and asked them if they would be willing to do the same type of enforcement effort that we're gonna do at the same time," he said.
The states. Participating states include Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Texas and Missouri, among others.
The results. Over 72 hours last week, state authorities and ICE officers arrested more than 230 people in the country illegally, including more than 40 with commercial driver's licenses, in an expansion of Oklahoma's "Operation Guardian," which the Department of Homeland Security promoted Monday. The Daily Wire lists the countries of those arrested, among them Armenia, Brazil, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mongolia, Peru and Ukraine, and says many were released into the country under the Biden administration.
Two cases. In one stop, a trooper pulled over a vehicle carrying five adult men under investigation for human trafficking and a 17-year-old girl who had crossed the border alone. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said federal authorities had been looking for the girl: "Because of this operation, we were able to locate her." In another, a Honduran man in a stolen vehicle allegedly assaulted a trooper, leaving him with a dislocated elbow and a broken arm, and was caught after a four-hour manhunt. He was found with methamphetamine, the report says.
The stated goal. Tipton said the operations will continue until the trucking companies hiring such drivers and the brokers using those companies "go out of business," and called it a public safety issue when drivers of 80,000-pound trucks have not been trained properly and cannot read or speak English. He said many of those caught in Oklahoma had felony warrants, domestic assault cases or multiple DUIs.
What we could not check. These are officials' statements and the arrests are not convictions. Breitbart's headline describes the 230 as truckers, while The Daily Wire says more than 40 of the 230 held commercial licenses. We read only Breitbart's summary and have not seen DHS's release, so we cannot say which description is right.