Attorney General Pam Bondi stated during a Thursday cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump that the federal agents deployed on September 29 as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force has already made more than 500 arrests and seized 144 illegal firearms.
Praising federal law enforcement involved with the task force and the Memphis Police Department (MPD), Bondi announced, “We’ve been making arrests left and right. So far we made 562 arrests and seized 144 illegal guns. Just in the short time we’ve been in Memphis.”
She told the president, “last night alone we made 91 arrests,” which resulted in the seizure of 19 firearms.
“One was a warrant for a homicide, and four sex offenders who had active warrants,” Bondi said in the meeting. “One was a sex offender on a child. Everything we did in Memphis was worth it, in my opinion, for that one arrest.”
Bondi additionally seemed to allude to the fact that the daily number of arrests appears to be increasing despite the total number of arrests since the task force deployed nearly two weeks ago.
“But yet we’ve made 562 arrests and still going strong in Memphis,” said Bondi. Praising other cabinet members assembled for the meeting, she told the president, “it’s because it’s all of us. It’s a team working for you to make America safe, all together, around the clock.”
In response to Bondi’s report, Trump described those arrested by the federal task force as “career criminals” who have an outsized impact on Memphis’ crime rate.
“These people commit crimes every single day, they’re sick, and we’re taking them out,” said the president. “In some cases, we’re bringing them back to their countries, where Biden allowed – with his stupid open borders that we had in our country – to come in. But they’re being brought back to other places, or they’re being put in jail, but they’re career criminals.”
Though Memphis Mayor Paul Young has described the ongoing operations in his city as an opportunity to expand on his administration’s earlier crime reduction initiatives, Trump additionally lamented that other Democratic leaders were resisting his administration’s effort to maintain law and order.
“It’s a new issue,” said Trump. “It’s called crime. We stop crime and they allow crime. They want crime.”
The update from Bondi followed the recent warning by the Memphis activist group, Vecendarios 901, who claimed that residents were being “snatched up by ICE” during the federal deployment.
Watch the president’s full cabinet meeting:
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].Â
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