Federal officials have arrested 214 alleged members of a notorious transnational gang who had entered the United States, after a sweep conducted over the last month, the Justice Department announced.

“President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to reduce crime and take down transnational criminal organizations, and we will be relentless in our pursuit of these objectives,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

A joint Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department operation targeting MS-13 netted a total of 267 arrests in El Salvador and the United States, according to officials. Ninety-three of those arrested in the United States stand accused of felony drug or violence charges, including murder and aggravated robbery. Another 121 “were arrested on administrative immigration violations,” DOJ said.

The sweep, which took place between October 8 and November 11, drew applause from a top Senate Republican who noted that 193 of the arrestees were in the country illegally.

“As today’s announcement shows, MS-13 and other violent criminal organizations have exploited America’s broken immigration system to expand their reach around the country,” Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee, said Thursday. “We must work together to apprehend these gang members and I applaud the Trump administration for bringing these gang members to justice.”

Immigrant advocates protest that the gang-crackdown is an "attempt to incite fear" in order to justify a heavy-handed immigration policy. “Their generalizations of our community are simply untrue,” said in July. “On the contrary, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population, and that gap continues to widen each year.”

Some of the individuals arrested were taken into custody without being accused of any crime other than entering the country illegally, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged.

“We have information, we have pictures of him actually flashing gang signs,” an official told CBS following a recent arrest. “The purpose of classifying him as a gang member or a gang associate is because once he goes in front of an immigration judge, we don't want him to get bail, because the whole point of this operation is to get these known gang members off the street.”

The Trump administration was spurred in part by a rash of murders in Long Island, including several slain high school students.

“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has the ability to pursue complex criminal cases using our statutory authorities and to prevent crime by using our administrative arrest authorities to remove gang members from the country,” ICE deputy director Thomas Homan said Thursday. “We will not rest until every member, associate, and leader of MS-13 has been held accountable for their crimes, and those in this country illegally have been removed.”