15-State Highway Sweep Arrests 230 Illegal Aliens and Finds a Missing 17-Year-Old Girl Riding With Six Men

Oklahoma troopers had a problem. Every time they set up at the state’s ports of entry to hunt for illegal alien truck drivers, the drivers found out and went somewhere else.

“Our intel analysts would immediately start seeing social media posts and things like that from the east and west coast,” Oklahoma Public Safety Commissioner Tim Tipton said Monday, “telling each other that, hey, Oklahoma’s back at it again,” and to “divert, go around Oklahoma.”

So Oklahoma took away the detour. Tipton said his department called 14 other states and asked them to run the same enforcement at the same time. From Oct. 26 to Oct. 28, troopers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement worked highways from North Dakota to Florida in what the Department of Homeland Security calls Operation Guardian.

The result, announced by DHS at a Tulsa trucking company on Monday: more than 230 illegal aliens arrested in 72 hours, including more than 40 holding commercial driver’s licenses. And in one car on Interstate 40, troopers found a 17-year-old girl Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says the government had been looking for.

The girl in the car

On Oct. 27, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol stopped a vehicle on I-40 and found that all seven people inside were illegal aliens, DHS says, including an unaccompanied minor. The driver, Arturo Alvarado-Islas of Mexico, entered the country illegally at an unknown time and place and was handed to ICE the same day.

Tipton filled in the rest. The girl had come into the country as an unaccompanied minor during the Biden administration. “Obviously, nobody knew where she was at,” he said. The people she was riding with “had removal orders and were here illegally and were also being investigated for human trafficking.”

Mullin said the 17-year-old was traveling cross-country from Arizona with six men, all here illegally, who either had criminal records or final deportation orders. “We’d been looking for her,” he said. “Because of this operation, we were able to locate her.”

Then he let loose. “Can you imagine what this young girl, 17, who’d been trafficked for years, has went through, and you still want to say that sanctuary policy is a good thing?” Mullin asked. “If that doesn’t break your heart, I don’t know what does.”

Mullin tied her to a bigger number. He said the Biden administration released 450,000 unaccompanied children “into the hands of unvetted sponsors,” some of whom took in 20 to 40 kids, and that his department has now located more than 160,000 of them, working with partners in every state except some blue states he said refuse to cooperate.

A broken arm and a manhunt

The day before, on Oct. 26, a trooper pulled over a driver on I-35 for looking down at his phone. The car came back stolen out of Texas. When the trooper tried to arrest the driver, Luis Armando Garlo Rodriguez, an illegal alien from Honduras, he resisted, broke the trooper’s arm and ran, according to DHS.

Tipton said the trooper suffered a dislocated elbow along with the broken arm, and it took about a four-hour manhunt to catch Rodriguez, who also had methamphetamine on him. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations office in Tulsa has charged him with assaulting, resisting and impeding officers.

Those weren’t the only extras. Tipton said many of the drivers stopped in this operation and earlier ones had felony warrants, domestic assault cases or multiple DUIs.

From all over the world

Anyone who thinks this is a Mexico problem should look at the list. Tipton read off home countries from this one operation alone: Armenia, Brazil, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Peru and Ukraine, and he said that wasn’t all of them. Mullin added Cuba, Georgia, Haiti, India, Jordan, Mexico and Venezuela. “So when people say it’s just for Mexico, it’s not Mexico,” Mullin said. “It’s from all over the world.”

Tipton said most of them “crossed the border during the Biden administration and were released, as the Secretary said, on parole and given a permit. And then they’ve gone and gotten these licenses.”

Mullin described that pipeline with open sarcasm: parole into the country, a court date “in eight to nine years,” and “by the way, here’s a work permit. Go get a CDL and drive on the road. Be safe. Don’t hurt anybody.” And, he added, “don’t worry about learning to speak English.”

“What’s controversial about making sure that you can read and write and you can understand law enforcement commands?” he asked.

Why the licenses keep coming

Guardian is the latest in a long crackdown. ICE launched Operation Guardrail, a nationwide sweep of commercial vehicles, on Sept. 25 and had arrested 303 people through it as of Oct. 29. From Jan. 20, 2025, through Oct. 28 of this year, ICE made 4,795 CDL-related arrests nationwide and 1,233 arrests involving CDL holders, DHS says.

The licenses themselves are the other half of the fight. In September 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued an emergency rule restricting “non-domiciled” CDLs, the kind states hand to foreign drivers, after a federal audit found more than 25% of the ones California checked had been issued improperly. A federal appeals court in Washington put that rule on hold that November. The Transportation Department has since finalized a rule limiting those licenses to a few vetted visa categories, ending the use of work permits as proof of eligibility and requiring a federal immigration-status check on every applicant. It says at least 17 fatal crashes and 30 deaths in 2025 were caused by non-domiciled drivers who would now be ineligible.

But licenses already in a driver’s wallet don’t disappear on their own. “It should be really simple for these states to be able to revoke these driver’s licenses that they issued, and tens of thousands of them,” Mullin said, naming California and New York. “I don’t know why it’s even controversial to be having this conversation.”

What comes next

Tipton said this was, to his knowledge, the first time this many states had run one of these operations at the same time, and it won’t be the last. The goal, he said, is to keep going until the trucking companies hiring these drivers, and the brokers using those companies, go out of business.

For the honest carriers, that’s good news. Mullin held the event at the headquarters of Melton Truck Lines, whose CEO, Bob Peterson, he called a friend and a mentor. The stars-and-stripes rig behind the podium is one the company wraps for the veterans it hires. “That’s what patriotism looks like,” Mullin said.

“Our roads are safer with these illegal aliens no longer behind the wheels of semi-trucks,” Mullin said in the department’s release.

Think of it like a speed trap. Set one up on one road and drivers text each other to take another. Set them up on every road at once, and there’s nowhere left to go.