US homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin has announced that immigration officials had arrested 2,197 people in New York state in about a month-long operation, suggesting an uptick in arrests compared with recent months.

Speaking at a news conference, Mullin described the enforcement push as a response to the lack of co-operation from governor Kathy Hochul and mayor Zohran Mamdani on the federal government’s crackdown on unlawful immigration, which it has named “Operation Rotten Apple.”

“Operation Rotten Apple was an operation we decided to take on because you have a very liberal-slash-socialist mayor here in New York City,” he said. “You have a governor that refuses to work with us.”

The New York operation, which took place between July 27th-August 29th, is part of a broader surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrests nationwide as homeland security officials face pressure from the White House to ramp up enforcement.

In July, immigration arrests reached a record high of 49,000, nearing the Trump administration’s recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

In New York state, immigration arrests have been climbing after dropping to about 860 in April, according to federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group. More than 1,550 people were arrested in July, according to that data.

Homeland security officials on Tuesday emphasised that the operation was “not random enforcement” and that they were catching the “worst of the worst” criminals.

But as arrests by Ice have climbed in recent months, the agency’s operations have increasingly swept up immigrants without criminal records. A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were accused of violating civil immigration laws but had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of federal data found.

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At the news conference, Mullin was flanked by what appeared to be large mug shots with phrases such as “rape” and “kidnapping, murder,” and a homeland security news release said that those arrested in the operation included “murderers, rapists, paedophiles, drug traffickers and violent assailants.” But Mullin also indicated that some of those arrested in the past month may not have had criminal records.

“Regardless if you’re a criminal or not, if you entered this country and you cheated, you didn’t come in the legal way, because there are people entering this country every single day legally,” he said.

In response to a follow-up query, the department did not offer further clarity. Hochul, speaking at an unrelated news conference Tuesday, cast doubt on whether the more than 2,000 people arrested in the operation had criminal records.

“There is no way that that number constitutes people committed crimes the way we consider a crime – a crime in New York state,” Hochul said. “They consider anybody who crossed the border a criminal, so don’t fall for that. That’s what I’m calling out. Do not fall for that.”

Mamdani, appearing alongside the governor, accused Ice of terrorising immigrants and said the agency was criminalising “the very act of being an immigrant.”

“We are proud as New York City to be a city that has sanctuary policies,” Mamdani said. “These are policies that used to be defended by Democrats and Republicans alike. These were policies introduced to ensure every New Yorker would feel comfortable coming forward to report crimes as well.”

Trump administration officials have long threatened to flood the region with immigration officers. Tom Homan, the White House border tsar, has vowed to increase immigration enforcement in New York since last year.

In June, after Hochul signed legislation that bans agents from wearing masks and prevents state and local law enforcement from signing co-operation agreements with Ice, Homan warned that a reckoning was imminent. A federal judge blocked the mask ban last month.

Speaking alongside Mullin at the news conference, Kenneth Genalo, an Ice field office director for New York City, invoked the attacks of September 11th, 2001, in his remarks, saying that “public safety depends on federal, state and local law enforcement co-operation.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.