(TNND) — A fugitive wanted for kidnapping and criminal association was handed off to Mexican authorities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Arizona announced Monday.

On the other side of the country, ICE said Monday that a “high-ranking leader” in the MS-13 gang was extradited to America to face racketeering conspiracy charges.

That man posed “a significant threat to the safety of the American people,” an ICE official said in a news release.

Federal agents in Houston arrested nine immigrant sex offenders in just one week, ICE said this weekend on X.

And ICE agents arrested a Palestinian activist who reportedly played a prominent role in Columbia University protests over the Gaza war.

The Department of Homeland Security said Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest was part of President Donald Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.

"Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization," DHS said in a social media post.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in his own social media post that the U.S. “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Khalil has not been formally charged with a crime, The Associated Press reported.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that U.S. authorities have deported nearly two dozen suspected terrorists and almost 700 gang members in a month under the new Trump administration.

“Everywhere I've been in this country, out there, looking at what President Trump has done on immigration and border enforcement, the people that I meet are saying thank you,” Noem said. “Thank you for getting these terrorists out of the country.”

Noem said late last month that ICE arrests jumped 627% under Trump, with over 20,000 ICE arrests in the president’s first month.

And her department said last month that border encounters plunged 93% after Trump took office.

The National News Desk reached out to officials with ICE and the DHS on Monday for updated enforcement figures but didn’t get a response by the time this story was published.

Ernesto Sagás, an expert in politics and U.S. immigration policies who teaches at Colorado State University, previously said the Trump administration is making “a PR blitz” out of immigration arrests, and it’s working as a deterrent to new border crossings.

Trump campaigned on tougher border security and immigration policies, and he declared a national emergency at the Southern border on Day 1 of his administration.

True to his campaign promises, Trump has taken on a more enforcement-based approach to immigration.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it’s no longer catching and releasing illegal immigrants.

CBP on Monday announced the launch of a mobile app that encourages immigrants in the country illegally to notify the government of their intent to self-deport.

Noem said in the CBS interview that the app lets unauthorized immigrants “choose to go home on their own and keep their families united.”

“Remember, they have an option to go home on their own,” she said. “We are giving them that opportunity to do that, and we will help facilitate that. And if they don't, and they end up coming into our enforcement opportunities that we have in front of us, you know, they may never get the chance to come back. So, people need to remember, if they self-deport, they will have an opportunity to come back to this country legally.”

Noem also said the U.S. will keep thousands of military troops at the southern border “until that border is completely secure, and we see all-time record lows of encounters.”

“Our Border Patrol is doing fantastic work, but we're going to keep (military troops) there until the whole world gets the message that this isn't Joe Biden's world anymore,” Noem continued. “This is President Donald Trump's country, where we have a border, where we have laws, and it applies equally to everybody.”

Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has said illegally present immigrants with criminal backgrounds are being prioritized in the early going of the immigration crackdown.

But Homan has said any immigrant who isn’t authorized to be in the country is fair game to be arrested and deported.

“I won't be satisfied until every criminal gang member is eradicated from this country, every illegal alien with a criminal conviction is eradicated in this country,” Homan told TNND’s Kristine Frazao last month. “Then we open the aperture up to those who are illegally in the United States.”

Sagás told TNND recently that Trump frames his anti-immigration policies as anti-crime policies.

“It's this rhetoric that immigrants are a clear, present danger to American society, and the best thing we can do is to get rid of as many of them as we can,” Sagás said.

But criminologist Alex Piquero said that despite concerns, the statistical evidence doesn’t show that immigrants cause more crime.

“Yeah, so, the evidence on that for over a dozen years is unequivocally clear that immigrants do not commit more crime than native-born Americans. That's true for serious crime, as well,” Piquero, a professor at the University of Miami and a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, told TNND last year.

Piquero said data collection has been limited, but the research has produced consistent results.

The FBI relies on crime data from thousands of police agencies across the country in order to publish national statistics, and most agencies don’t flag immigration status during an arrest.

Piquero and some colleagues turned to Texas several years back for some answers, as it’s one place where immigration status is recorded when people are arrested.

There, they found that American citizens were 1.19 times more likely to be arrested than immigrants, all else equal.

The same held true for violent crimes (citizens 1.18 times more likely to be arrested) and drug offenses (citizens 1.67 times more likely).