On Tuesday night, as state police Supt. Col. Brendan Doherty was telling an advisory committee on the governor’s immigration order that troopers would not be conducting raids to capture illegal immigrants, 12 of his detectives were about to participate with 50 immigration agents in an operation that would lead to the arrest of 31 suspected illegal immigrants.

The situation threw Doherty into a swirling controversy of semantics yesterday with him denying that what he said was in any way contradictory to what happened.

“I stated it’s not a state police initiative to conduct raids and sweeps. This was not a raid,” Doherty said during a morning news conference. “This was a police action. These were arrests…. We do not initiate raids of any buildings, businesses or homes regarding ICE matters.”

The distinction was lost on several people yesterday.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that at the meeting of the governor’s advisory panel to monitor the “unintended consequences” of the state’s crackdown on illegal immigration, “representatives from community organizations were expliI stated it’s not a state police initiative to conduct raids and sweeps. This was not a raidcitly told by the state police that the agency would not be in the business of conducting immigration raids. We now know that at almost the very same moment, they were doing just that in coordination with federal authorities.”

Brown said, “When confronted with this blatant contradiction, we hear the head of the state police explain today that [Tuesday’s] raids weren’t really ‘raids,’ they were ‘arrests.’ ”

Brown called Doherty’s words an “Orwellian twist of language…”

Advisory panel member Toby Ayers, executive director of Rhode Island for Community & Justice, said she was troubled by the timing of what happened.

“The concern about the process is as we sat there [at the advisory panel meeting] and the law enforcement [representatives on the panel] emphasized that they were not doing sweeps, the courthouses were being swept,” she said.

—With reports from staff writers Karen Lee Ziner and Cynthia Needham

tmooney@projo.com