Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced in Dallas on Thursday, October 29, that a ten-day Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation across Texas, called Lone Star Mission, ended with 4,170 arrests. "Over 60% of those individuals had a criminal background," Mullin said, according to The National News Desk, and the department's release names five men and the records it says they have. The numbers are the department's own; nobody outside it has yet counted, and the ICE records that would allow a count were last released in late August. DHS did not provide a breakdown of the criminal histories of those arrested or say how many had been convicted of violent crimes, KERA reported. Mullin said the other 40 percent had no criminal record and called them "collateral criminals," people who "may not been the target, but they were in the vehicle, they were in a house, or wherever the warrant was served at," NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth reported.
The nearest independent yardstick does not cover this operation. ICE's own arrest records, obtained through public-records requests by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News, run through August 5 and show that in July 2026, 26 percent of people arrested by federal agents in Texas had "an existing criminal conviction," down from 48 percent in February 2025. Those records count convictions, and the Morning News says its data excludes transfers from local jails; Mullin's "criminal background" is undefined, DHS's own five cases include an arrest and a foreign warrant, and a targeted ten-day operation would be expected to differ from a month of arrests statewide. Mullin said the operation allowed officers to locate people they had been trying to find for some time: "Most of these individuals are looking for, for quite some time, but we just didn't have the resources to be able to go in and do a pattern of life on the individuals, make sure we know where they live, know where they work out," he said, according to NBC 5.
Mullin spoke five days before the November 3 midterm elections, a timing that KERA, Univision and El Informador noted; KERA described a news conference that "at times took on a political tone."
What the department announced
The DHS release calls Lone Star Mission "a coordinated Texas-wide enforcement effort conducted by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) field offices across the state," run October 19-29 by the five ERO field offices in Texas: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso and Harlingen. "Thanks to Texas law enforcement and our federal partners, over the course of this operation, we arrested murderers, sexual assailants, drunk drivers, and alien smugglers," Mullin said in the release. Of the 4,170 arrests, 879 were in North Texas, NBC 5 reported.
The release names five of those arrested: Javier Hernandez Alcon, Orlando Aguilar, Ramon Antonio Martinez, Gerardo Daniel Rivera-Rivera and Victor Manuel Macias-Castro. For four it lists convictions, for offenses including burglary, felony intoxication assault with a vehicle, felony sexual assault, alien-smuggling conspiracy and illegal re-entry; Martinez is listed only as wanted in Honduras in connection with a killing, and Hernandez Alcon's capital-murder entry is a prior arrest, not a conviction. The department had not released a list of the others or details of their alleged offenses as of Thursday afternoon, The National News Desk reported; the Tampa Free Press reported that ICE did not say where they are held but said they remain in federal custody pending deportation proceedings or prosecution.
What "criminal background" covers
NBC 5 paraphrased Mullin as saying that more than 60 percent of those arrested had criminal backgrounds, "including convictions involving murder, sexual assault, drunken driving and immigrant smuggling," in the station's words. DHS did not say in its release whether the figure counts convictions only or also pending charges, and KERA, Univision and El Informador each reported that the department gave no such breakdown; none had appeared on DHS's press-release page or in ICE's newsroom when Profoundd checked at 18:41 UTC on October 30. "They should never be in this country to begin with, regardless if it's a violent crime or it's petty theft," Mullin said, according to KERA. Univision's Dallas station recalled that in September Mullin denied that any order limited arrests to people with criminal histories and said the agency would keep enforcing immigration law; the station noted that 4,170 arrests are not 4,170 convictions or deportations.
Who ran it, and with whom
Lone Star Mission was a federal ICE operation, separate from Operation Lone Star, the state border program Governor Greg Abbott launched in 2021, KERA noted. Mullin credited "Texas law enforcement"; NBC 5 reported partnerships with Texas sheriff's offices and police departments and arrests involving outstanding warrants. The Post Millennial reported that "Federal officials emphasized ICE's 287(g) program," under which ICE delegates some immigration-enforcement authority to state and local officers; Dissenter, an aggregator that says it synthesized other outlets' reporting, wrote that the operation "leaned heavily" on it. The DHS release does not mention the program, and Profoundd found no list of participating agencies in the DHS release, the ICE newsroom or the coverage cited here as of 18:41 UTC on October 30.
The opposing case, and who has not spoken yet
Three days earlier, on October 26, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, at a union office in Houston, said Democrats were committed "not to give a dime to Donald Trump's violent mass deportation machine" without structural changes to ICE, Houston Public Media's Andrew Schneider reported in a story carried by Texas Public Radio. "If you've got rogue ICE agents who think they'll never be held accountable," Jeffries said, "then we're going to continue to see the type of violence that has been unleashed and brutality on law-abiding immigrant communities and on American citizens as we horrifically saw with Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good." Mullin on Thursday turned to sanctuary jurisdictions: "When you support sanctuary policies, you're supporting gang bangers, you're supporting child pedophiles, you're supporting rapists, you're supporting cartels, you're supporting organized crime," he said, according to KERA.
KERA also reported scrutiny of ICE officers in Texas over three use-of-force incidents since July in Houston and Austin; federal authorities say officers responded to threats or to men evading arrest, and witnesses, attorneys or local officials reviewing the incidents have disputed those accounts. In the third of those cases, a Harris County grand jury on Friday indicted ICE agent Mario Alberto Morales on a felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after he was filmed running over Miguel Parra-Hernandez, 48, during an October 10 vehicle pursuit in Houston, nine days before Lone Star Mission began, the Texas Tribune reported. In a statement, an unnamed ICE spokesperson said the indictment "is nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians" and that "Allegations that ICE struck Miguel Parra-Hernandez intentionally are reckless and false," the Tribune reported.
ICE has said Parra-Hernandez stepped in front of the car and that local officials do not have the authority to investigate federal officers acting in the course of their duties, the Associated Press reported. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said it is "patently false" that his office cannot investigate, Houston Public Media reported, and Teare has said video clearly contradicts ICE's account, according to the AP. Morales's lawyer, David Lindenmuth, criticized the indictment as a rushed "political prosecution" and called the crash an accident, saying Morales swerved toward Parra-Hernandez to avoid an idling truck in front of him, the Houston Chronicle reported. ICE has also said its agents were searching for a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who had a deportation order, and believed that man was in the same truck as Parra-Hernandez; Mendoza-Cervantes's daughter later told the New York Times that her father died nearly a decade ago, the Tribune reported. ICE has not responded to that claim, the AP reported, and Teare said his office has not independently verified it, according to the Chronicle.
Profoundd searched on October 30, through web searches in English and Spanish and the press or news pages of the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Texas Democratic Party and RAICES, for statements on Lone Star Mission from those groups and Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, and found none as of 18:44 UTC; Talarico's campaign news pages did not load, and X accounts were not checked. The front pages of the Texas Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman carried no headline on the operation at 15:49 UTC or at 18:44 UTC, though by the second check the Tribune, the Chronicle and the Morning News all carried the indictment story; KXAN's site refused the request both times. The announcement was about a day old.
This article reflects reporting through the afternoon of Friday, October 30, 2026. Sources: the Department of Homeland Security, October 29; NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth; KERA News; The National News Desk via CBS Austin; El Informador and Univision 23 Dallas (both Spanish); the Dallas Morning News, October 30; Houston Public Media via Texas Public Radio, October 26; the Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle (indictment, Morales), Houston Public Media and the Associated Press via NBC 5, October 30; the Tampa Free Press; Dissenter; the Post Millennial.
