In North Texas, Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are carrying out daily targeted enforcement actions, according to the agency’s local leadership.

“Here in Dallas, we have officers in the field every single morning doing targeted enforcement actions,” said Robert Cerna, acting field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Dallas.

Cerna told NBC 5 that about 80 percent of arrests made by the Dallas ICE office involve people with criminal records. He said those individuals were targeted because they had received a final order of removal from an immigration judge and were considered a threat to public safety.

Some arrests are made through ICE’s criminal alien program, Cerna said.

“Individuals that are in county jails, and that we place a detainer on. These are individuals that are here in the country without documentation that have broken a law here in the United States,” Cerna said.

Dallas Enforcement and Removal Operations told NBC 5 that, as of last week, the office had arrested more than 9,644 noncitizens since October 2025. Close to 8,000 of those arrested had criminal records or pending criminal charges.

The Dallas ICE field office reported that it averages about 100 arrests per day, the second-highest total in the country.

Cerna joined the Dallas ERO office in July, two months before a large ICE hiring event held in Arlington.

“I can tell you that since that hiring event, our staffing level is pretty much doubled,” Cerna said.

When asked how ICE coordinates with local law enforcement, Cerna said that because there is no 287(g) agreement in Dallas, Dallas police officers are limited to securing a safe perimeter during operations.

“Our officers would reach out and indicate that we’re going to be in this area, conducting targeted enforcement operations, and we advise whatever jurisdiction that we’re in that area just so that they are aware that we, federal law enforcement, ICE officers are in that area,” Cerna said.

According to data from the Deportation Data Project, arrests nationwide of people without a criminal history or pending charges have increased threefold, raising questions about whether ICE enforcement priorities are shifting away from convicted criminals.

There are few bigger chores than moving. It’s really more than a mere chore – a super chore, if you will – to move, as you have to bundle up a seemingly endless amount of smaller chores to make it happen. For more than 2 million people in the U.S. last year, one of those tasks was “renting a U-Haul.”

In 2025, a massive number of those trucks were making their way to the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, and one suburb north of Dallas specifically. The recently released U-Haul Growth Index named Dallas as the leading “growth metro” in the U.S., with McKinney showing up as the No. 6 leading “growth city” in the country.  Unsurprisingly, Texas ranked as the No. 1 “growth state” in the study. 

“U-Haul customers arriving in Texas accounted for 50.7% of all one-way traffic in and out of the state last year (49.3% leaving),” the announcement for the annual survey noted. “Compared to 2024, customers coming to Texas rose 3% YOY while departures rose just 1% YOY. Texas also ranked first on the U-Haul Growth Index from 2016-18 and 2021-23.” 

There are plenty of brand-sponsored surveys that one should not take very seriously, but it’s likely not a stretch to take U-Haul’s numbers seriously, given their market dominance over the past few decades. 

U-Haul ranked states by their net gain or loss of more than 2.5 million customers in the U.S. and Canada who rented a one-way truck, trailer or moving containers in one state and dropped off their equipment in another state.

For regular readers of the Observer, McKinney finding itself high atop such a list is less surprising than yet another disappointing Dallas Cowboys’ season. In the past few months alone, McKinney has been named the best U.S. city for renters and the ninth safest suburb in the country. 

McKinney received high marks in the SmartAsset safety report in areas that people looking for a new place to call home would certainly be interested in, such as a low violent crime rate, a low property crime rate, a low number of traffic deaths, and a low number of reported drug overdoses. 

As for North Texas, the U-Haul honor is nothing new either. 

“Second verse, same as the first. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area once again takes top honors as the No. 1 U-Haul growth metro, replicating its 2024 honor with the greatest net gain of one-way customers during 2025,” the announcement read.

Reports on the number of people moving to the DFW area each year range from 170,000 to 200,000. Other warm-weather states and metro areas figured prominently inthe U-Haul Index, including Florida and Arizona. 

And since we in Dallas always like to beat Houston and Austin in just about anything, it’s worth noting that they were behind Dallas in the No. 2 and No. 3 sports, respectively.