The Obama administration announced last week that it had made America safer by arresting 3,100 illegal immigrants who have criminal records or are immigration fugitives or immigration violators. Twenty-four of that number were right here in New Hampshire.

If it is true, that is great news. We are all for getting illegal bad guys off the street. But since the federal government refuses to give us the names of the supposed bad guys, we can’t tell if it is true. Indeed, having the power to whisk people off the streets without identifying them is more than a little chilling.

We are told by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement announcement that among the 13 men and women arrested in Manchester is a Dominican national convicted of manufacturing marijuana, carrying a dangerous weapon and receiving stolen property.

He also had been charged with illegally re-entering the country.

But, again, since we don’t know the man’s name, we don’t know if any of this is true, nor do we know what becomes of such people. Are they put in a truck and headed for the nearest border? Are they put in a box and sent out to sea?

And why are we not told their names? ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein said it is “privacy policy.”

Whose privacy? Supposedly illegal immigrants with serious criminal records are entitled to privacy but the public isn’t entitled to know anything?

That is pretty novel. We wonder why the agents of Stalin, Hitler and other despots didn’t use that line when they were having Jews, homosexuals and people who looked at them cross-eyed simply disappear.

The Obama administration did this same act a year ago, announcing with great fanfare the arrest of 2,900 illegals across the country, with six of these “privacy policy” cases alleged to have occurred in the Granite State,

The Union Leader and Sunday News are suing ICE in federal court to force it to provide the names of those it claims to have arrested. We believe the taxpayers and citizens of New Hampshire have a right and a need to know when people are arrested here, for whatever reason.