Chalk up another win for immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents who have announced the completion of a successful operation targeting illegal aliens in Florida as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

ICE agents made 271 arrests in the sweep that was carried out last week and now the left and their fanatical leaders in California will have yet another thing to accuse the Trump administration of being just like the Gestapo about.

Fortunately for the law enforcement professionals who executed the operation, they didn’t have to deal with local officials putting their lives in danger like rogue officials the likes of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf did when she issued an official statement tipping off all illegal aliens in advance.

ICE arrests 271 across the state of Florida, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers arrested 271 aliens as part of an enforcement action targeting immigration violators and those who pose a threat to public safety. The enforcement action ran March 18 through 22. ERO officers made the arrests across the state of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Of those arrested by ICE during the enforcement action, 99 had criminal records that included felony convictions for serious or violent offenses, such as 1st degree murder, attempted murder, vehicular manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, attempted robbery, battery, burglary, child neglect, cruelty toward a child, domestic violence, drugs charges such as possession and trafficking, weapons offenses, abuse of the elderly. Additional convictions included driving under the influence, fraud, harboring aliens, illegal entry and re-entry to the United States, resisting an officer, traffic offenses, trespassing and workman’s compensation fraud. As part of the action, ERO officers apprehended 49 ICE fugitives and 39 individuals who were previously removed from the U.S., as well as two known gang members and one individual with an Interpol Red Notice.

“ICE continues our commitment to making our communities safer by removing threats to our public safety,” said Marc J. Moore, field office director for the ERO Miami Field Office, which oversees all of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. “Communities across Florida and Puerto Rico are safer today because of the hard work of the men and women of ERO.

During the operation, ERO was supported by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal and local law enforcement agencies, including the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service.

Arrests took place in 23 Florida counties, including 76 in Miami Dade, 65 in Broward, 27 in Duval, 17 in Palm Beach, 14 in Hillsborough, 10 in Orange, seven in Seminole, five in Manatee, five in Lee, four in Pinellas, four in Brevard, three in Polk, three in Indian River, two in Volusia, two in Bay, two in Martin, one in Escambia, one in Gadsden, one in Lake, one in Osceola, one in Sarasota, one in St. Lucie, one in Suwannee, 11 in Puerto Rico, and seven in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Arrest examples include:

On March 19, ERO officers arrested a Cuban citizen in Miami Dade. In 2014, the subject was convicted of attempted murder. The subject is currently pending a removal hearing by an immigration judge.

On March 20, ERO officers arrested a Mexican citizen in Pompano Beach. The subject was previously convicted of child exploitation charges in 2013. The subject is currently pending removal.

March 20, ERO officers from the Tampa office arrested a Haitian national and Bloods gang member in New York. He has multiple criminal convictions, including: burglary, patronized prostitution, possession of marijuana, meth and cocaine, criminal possession of a weapon, and rape in the first degree. He was designated as a registered sex offender for life and served five years in prison for rape.

Those arrested represented 36 countries throughout the world, including: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Anguilla, Bahamas, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Chile, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Jamaica, Kuwait, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and United Kingdom.

Arrested individuals who have outstanding orders of deportation, or who returned to the United States illegally after being deported, are subject to immediate removal from the country. The remaining individuals are in ICE custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge, or pending travel arrangements for removal.

Granted that the numbers are never what Americans who place a value on enforcing immigration law would like to see, but each of these operations that is successful is a step in the right direction.

Not for the first time, I flipped over to MSNBC this morning for the first hour block of Morning Joe. Mixed with probably half a dozen other reasons why the presidency of Donald J. Trump is hanging by a thread were yet more stories about collusion with Russians by members of his campaign team. As usual, there’s no word as to what on Earth they might have been “colluding” about, and much of it still comes in the form of speculation by nameless sources, but the story rarely changes. It’s all about the collusion.

Let’s just say for a moment that James Comey is eventually going to produce some sort of blockbuster bombshell showing that there was some form of “collusion” going on. Collusion to do what? And were any laws broken? A bigger concern is precisely what the Russians supposedly were trying to accomplish and if this “collusion” aided them in those goals. At the Washington Post this week there’s a fascinating essay from James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.”

Kirchick is no Trump cheerleader, as should be obvious from his previous work. He clearly has his share of misgivings about some of the President’s decisions and methods. But at the same time, he cites NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, who argues that there has been, “no proof of collusion, no evidence that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election, no revelation that fundamentally revises our understanding of the trajectory of events.” With that as a backdrop, Kirchick argues that Trump’s opponents who are constantly ginning up talk of collusion in terms of High Crimes and Misdemeanors are actually doing Russia’s work for them, undermining public confidence in our elections and even our democracy. (Emphasis added)

The word “collusion” became a household term. For some Trump critics, every action or utterance of his presidency — firings, tweets, executive orders — is analyzed through the prism of these presumptions, breathlessly anticipating special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s nearly year-long Russia investigation will find a smoking gun validating it all.

Trump supporters, up to and including Trump himself, have tried to delegitimize Mueller’s necessary investigation for crassly partisan purposes — with the president constantly professing innocence while routinely acting guilty. But it’s also true that Trump’s opponents, eagerly taking reports of each new crumb of circumstantial corroboration as ironclad proof of collusion, are rapidly delegitimizing the presidency, our government and democratic processes.

In their haste to brand President Trump a tool, they’re unwittingly doing the Russians’ work for them: validating the notion that our democracy is a sham.

That has the ring of truth to it. From the beginning, I’ve said that if it turns out that either the President or his campaign staff were knowingly working with actors from the Russian government to disrupt the election, alter the vote count or otherwise directly change the outcome, the public deserves to know and all guilty parties must be held to account. And if it involved the President himself then he would need to be impeached.

But if, as so many indicators have suggested thus far, the only fire under all of the MSM smoke is a few inexperienced campaign aides talking to people they thought might have useful information, only to continually fail like the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight, what then? If the Russians were the only party responsible for hacking the DNC emails (a subject still up for debate) then they may have succeeded in having an effect on the polls, but if they didn’t involve the Trump campaign then most of this collusion talk becomes smoke and mirrors.

But the President’s opponents in not only the Democratic Party but also the media, seem to be delivering in spades what Putin allegedly desires. (And I purposely say “opponents” here rather than “critics” because there is clearly an ongoing, direct campaign against the White House taking place.) With the employment numbers looking as good as they are, the stock market and people’s 401Ks soaring, taxes being lower and consumer confidence hitting impressive levels, how do you explain a sitting President who has to take comfort in his approval level which barely scrapes above 40% on occasion?

Easy. The poll respondents are being buried in a deluge of news reports every day suggesting that the sky is about to fall on the House of Trump. And if they lose faith in the person in the White House their confidence in the office itself begins to erode as well. In that regard, Kirchick makes a valid point. If Vladimir Putin’s goal truly was to undermine our democracy, he must be having a good chuckle at the moment.

Those numbers will come as no surprise to you or me, and probably as no surprise to lefties either. But they may come as a surprise to the media, which seems to be all-in on the theory that the Parkland students are leading a national popular awakening to the evils of guns and changing the politics of the issue forever.

Could be. We can’t assume too much about national opinion from the composition of a march, which will always draw more activists than regular voters. But here’s one data point about whether Something Has Changed: The marchers as a whole didn’t look like America and they weren’t all that focused on gun control.

Participants were also more likely than those at recent marches to be first-time protesters. About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before. This group was less politically engaged in general: Only about a third of them had contacted an elected official in the past year, while about three-quarters of the more seasoned protesters had.

Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting…

March for Our Lives protesters were also more likely to identify as ideologically moderate. About 16 percent did so, higher than at any other protest event since the inauguration. But unsurprisingly, it was still a very liberal crowd: 79 percent identified as “left-leaning” and 89 percent reported voting for Hillary Clinton.

Check my math, but between the new protesters and the experienced protesters, it looks like a shade under 50 percent claimed to have showed up for gun control. This was, in other words, as much a “Resistance” march as it was about guns. (Dana Fisher, the sociology professor who surveyed the marchers, is writing a book called “American Resistance,” go figure.) New protesters were particularly disinterested in gun issues, comparatively speaking: 56 percent of them said they showed up for “peace” and 42 percent claimed they were there to protest POTUS. For many newbies, this was more about being anti-Trump than about being anti-gun.

And just 10 percent were under 18, according to Fisher, another counterpoint to the media narrative that the Parkland students are leading an uprising of kids to do what liberal adults have tried and failed to do for decades. In fact, not only were the marchers not young, they were unusually old with an average just short of 49, which Fisher claims is higher than the average at most rallies she’s measured. The marchers were also overwhelmingly female at 70 percent and well educated, with 72 percent having a B.A. It was, in other words, on average a march by middle-aged professional women. That’s an important voter bloc but not a mirror held up to the electorate’s face.

Meanwhile:

[R]eports from the Federal Election Commission show donations to the NRA’s Political Victory Fund tripled from January to February.

In January, the NRA collected almost $248,000 in individual contributions. In February, they collected more than $779,000…

Since the Parkland shooting happened in the middle of the month, one could argue the relationship between it and the spike in donations is hard to prove.

However, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending, tracked itemized contributions (donations of $200 or more by an individual) in the days before and after the shooting. According to their data, in the two weeks after the shooting, itemized contributions to the NRA doubled from the previous two weeks.

Here again you can’t extrapolate too much from a single data point. Gun-rights supporters always double down after a mass shooting for fear that the anti-gun backlash might just succeed this time and turn into new state or federal regulations. Gotta buy those guns while you still can. This time is noteworthy, though, because Republicans control Congress and the White House, leaving the risk of a new federal “assault weapons” ban anytime soon at precisely zero. If there’s no near-term threat of losing your guns, why plow money into the NRA to protect them?

I think it’s because gun-rights supporters feel attacked and scapegoated to an unusual degree since the Parkland shooting. The NRA is always the evil mastermind in lefty narratives after mass shootings but some of the rhetoric, including and especially from the Parkland students themselves, has laid the blame for the murders directly on the organization and, by extension, its supporters. According to David Hogg, Marco Rubio’s original political sin is accepting money from the NRA; no amount of legislation he proposes now can atone for that. Rubio was explicitly compared to the Parkland shooter himself at that town hall/lynch mob CNN hosted, again because of his relationship with the organization. How can you watch that as a gun-rights supporter and not take offense at the suggestion that if you support a lobby group for gun rights for law-abiding people you have the blood of children on your filthy hands? What else can you do when you’re told that you’re a “bad guy” for objecting to being called a baby-killer by a teenager? Of course many are going to show solidarity by donating to the NRA.

Anyway. Whether or not the new gun-control push fizzles like every other gun-control push in the last 20 years, CNN will always have this. Total pwnage.

A brief history of how Parkland survivor David Hogg keeps schooling lawmakers on social media https://t.co/XrgoxjISdo pic.twitter.com/WShbJADDIy

— CNN (@CNN) March 29, 2018