In what authorities are calling the largest such roundup in the history of the country, more than 10,000 people were placed under arrest last week as part of a “high impact” initiative planned by Attorney General Gonzales, to mark the annual National Crime Victims Week.

In the New York area, between April 4 and 10, federal marshals working in concert with local law enforcement agencies placed 158 people under arrest, mostly during predawn raids and for drug-related crimes.

The theme of mass raids, Mr. Gonzales said in a statement, is that “justice isn’t served until the crime victims are.”

Undocumented immigrants were also targets of the raids, officials said.

Snared in the sweep was one of New York’s “100 Most Wanted Fugitives.” On April 4, a 22-year-old from the Bronx, Gary Jackson, was arrested by federal marshals in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Jackson has been a suspect in the murder of his former girlfriend Joneese Davis, 18, who was found bludgeoned to death in November 2003.

She was discovered severely beaten in the stairwell of a Bronx apartment building where her relatives had been living. Mr. Jackson and Davis had recently broken up at the time of her slaying, the police said.

The tip that led investigators to Mr. Jackson, police said, came from a woman he was dating in northern Florida.

Mr. Jackson was extradited to the Bronx Sunday.

An attorney for Mr. Jackson could not immediately be reached yesterday.

Around the country, a total of 959 law enforcement agencies worked in concert to execute 10,340 arrests. Those arrested included 162 suspects wanted on murder charges; 68 suspects wanted on kidnapping charges; 638 armed-robbery suspects; 1,727 assault suspects; 1,818 burglary suspects; 4,291 suspects wanted for drug related crimes, and 553 alleged sex offenders, the authorities said. In addition to the arrests, 243 guns, $370,000 in cash, 30 kilos of cocaine, and 204 kilos of marijuana were reported seized.

Nationally, the authorities said, a total of 13,851 warrants were cleared, and locally the number was 210.

At a press conference in Chelsea yesterday, and on the federal marshals’ Web site, the authorities publicized the mass sweeps by posting photographs of the arrests and video clips tailored for television news broadcasts.

The publicity push was such that senior investigators at New York said that because of a budget pinch they had to use federal investigators and marshals to compile press releases and information packets.

“I had to take people off the streets to this,” the chief inspector of the marshals’ regional task force, Andre LaBier, said.