Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun a 45-day operation across California, and the instruction given to officers is the part that makes it a departure.

Arrest all illegal immigrants they encounter, regardless of whether the person has a criminal history.

The operation is called Operation Safe California. It started in and around San Diego several days before the Washington Examiner reported it, and it had not been publicly announced.

More than 250 ICE officers have been deployed to Southern California. They are drawn from San Diego and reinforced from the Los Angeles and San Francisco field offices.

The plan moves north. Officers work their way up through Los Angeles and reach San Francisco by November.

Sources described as familiar with the plan told the Examiner that officers are under pressure to raise arrest numbers and are working six and seven days a week ahead of the November midterms.

The Daily Wire also reported the operation.

California was chosen for a specific reason, and it is a reason the state’s own policy created.

Sanctuary rules restrict how far local agencies may cooperate with ICE. In practice that means an illegal immigrant arrested on a state charge can finish that case and walk out of a county jail without ever being handed to federal custody.

Those are the people ICE would ordinarily get for free, at a jail door, with no street enforcement required. When that handoff stops, the agency either loses the case or goes out and finds the person in a neighborhood.

Which is the mechanism behind the instruction about criminal history. ICE is not saying criminal aliens stopped being the priority.

It is saying that in a state where the jails will not transfer them, enforcement moves out of the jail and into the community, and once officers are working a community they encounter everyone in it.

Critics will call that indiscriminate, and the administration’s position is that it is the predictable result of a state refusing to cooperate on the narrow cases everyone claims to agree about.

Both of those can be argued. What is not in dispute is the timing.

Forty-five days from early October runs through the midterms. An operation that reaches San Francisco in November arrives in the most hostile political terrain in the country, in the final weeks of a national campaign, in a state with 52 House seats.

No DHS response was included in the initial report. The department has said separately that deportation operations will continue.