Both The New York Times and The Washington Post are hyperventilating because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are arresting illegal aliens at airports, which they claim is a newfangled alliance between the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and ICE.

ICE agents arresting illegal aliens at airports is not a new phenomenon, but the current level of arrests is.

According to the Times and WaPo, the individuals who are being arrested as they attempt to board domestic flights have either overstayed their visas, are in the process of renewing their visas, or recently married an American citizen and have not yet established permanent residency. Of course, the left-leaning agitprops neglected to mention that a significant number of these arrestees have criminal records and/or are a threat to national security.

Criminals and potential terrorists don’t garner Leftmedia sympathy; it’s the au pair or the honeymooning newlyweds who get attention. This helps spread the long-running leftist narrative: Visa enforcement should be handled not with the heavy hand of ICE but with kid gloves.

For leftists, “people with expired visas” are not lawbreakers. Cesar Vargas, New York’s first illegal immigrant attorney, said in 2018 that arresting someone who has overstayed their visa is like arresting someone for a parking ticket: It’s a civil offense, not a criminal one, so it shouldn’t be treated as a crime worthy of police intervention. Interestingly, Vargas married an American citizen and is no longer “undocumented.”

Had visa enforcement been strictly policed, several of the 9/11 hijackers would never have boarded those planes. Evoking the 9/11 Islamist attack is inconsequential to leftists, however, because they want to harp on today’s narrative of oppressors vs. oppressed. Therefore, they sniff out immigration lawyers who can attest that the shift by ICE and TSA under the Trump administration is much more intense than they have experienced.

The New York Times elaborated:

Shannon Shepherd, an immigration lawyer who is vice chair for the Chicago chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she and other lawyers were revising longstanding advice about domestic air travel.

“Before, I was saying, ‘As long as you have an ID, you can travel domestically,’” Ms. Shepherd said. “Now I am turning around and saying, ‘If you are in the process of changing status, avoid any travel.’”

This likely means that the Biden administration was not arresting people for traveling with an expired visa, not that the immigration laws are new. “This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Reading between the lines, this shift marks something much more interesting.

First, it means that Border Patrol has staunched the flow of illegal aliens crossing the border. President Donald Trump did this without Congress having to enact any more laws. Remember when Joe Biden’s administration claimed that it couldn’t close the border because it didn’t have the authority and because the U.S. didn’t have the right laws in place?

Second, it means that ICE’s boots-on-the-ground measures have been successful — notwithstanding the violent and angry protests by leftists in blue states like Minnesota.

Third, it means that ICE is fine-tuning its efforts. There have been an immense number of self-deportations, and those being detained now are likely the holdouts.

Despite pushback from anti-ICE protesters across the country, the Trump administration’s deportation efforts have been a roaring success, even if that narrative won’t get splashed across the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Their griping is a victory flag for the American people.