How to Use dragnet in a Sentence

dragnet

noun
  • Nine suspects were caught in the police dragnet.
  • To save her from the Nazi dragnet, her parents gave her up at the age of 4 months.
    Bart Barnes, BostonGlobe.com, 13 July 2019
  • El Cirujano escaped the police dragnet and has yet to be caught.
    Danny Gold, SI.com, 23 July 2019
  • The story explains why the dragnet took place, and the feds’ argument for keeping the assets.
    Justin Ray Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2021
  • The court order is the latest salvo in Mr. Abramovich’s attempt to push back against a global dragnet on his assets in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
    Max Colchester, WSJ, 10 Nov. 2022
  • There is a growing concern about the role A.I. could play in this digital dragnet.
    Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 28 June 2022
  • Equipped with a large needle, a small scraper and a knife, Gaiyan fixes the frayed and torn sections of a dragnet, a weighted net that can be drawn across a wide area.
    The Economist, 13 Jan. 2021
  • Bao Fan, a star investment banker, went missing in February and is believed to have been caught up in the dragnet.
    Laura He, CNN, 13 Sep. 2023
  • But the recent outbreaks have led to frustration and grumbling as more and more people have been caught up in the virus-control dragnet.
    New York Times, 21 Jan. 2022
  • That might have been the precise moment that the man believed to be Cunanan took his life and ended a dragnet that galvanized the nation.
    By Frances Robles, John Lantigua and Martin Merzer, miamiherald, 2 July 2017
  • As has happened with past EDD account freezes, some legitimate claimants got swept up in the dragnet.
    Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Jan. 2022
  • This Times exclusive explains why the dragnet took place, and the feds’ argument for keeping the assets.
    Laura Blasey, Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2021
  • For drivers caught in the state’s carceral dragnet, fines and fees imposed by the government are just one side of an extractive coin.
    Jack McCordick, The New Republic, 13 Sep. 2023
  • In recent weeks, the demonstrators have used the lasers to keep pace with a widening dragnet by authorities.
    Jennifer Hassan, Washington Post, 1 Aug. 2019
  • Most people caught in this dragnet will not be like Rudy Carcamo-Carranza.
    Alvaro M. Bedoya, The Atlantic, 21 June 2017
  • That one is courtesy of an ex-girlfriend who helped John escape a dragnet in Belize after he’d been accused of shooting his neighbor in the back of the head.
    Andy Meek, BGR, 24 Aug. 2022
  • Though most caught up in the dragnet are Uighurs, the biggest ethnicity in the region, some 1.5m ethnic Kazakhs live in Xinjiang, too.
    The Economist, 6 Feb. 2020
  • After the shooting, police locked down an elementary school across the street and set up a perimeter, but the shooter eluded the dragnet.
    Matthew Ormseth, Los Angeles Times, 22 Dec. 2021
  • A week before the latest killing spree in Hanau, German police rounded up 12 far-right extremists in a dragnet that swept across six states.
    Can Dündar, Time, 25 Feb. 2020
  • Manzo eluded the dragnet, and the freeway was later reopened, police said.
    Matthew Ormseth, Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 2021
  • However, a few of the worst scoundrels, including Mr. Warner, managed to elude the U.S. dragnet despite the evidence amassed against him.
    David Hirshey, WSJ, 7 June 2018
  • Those advising against the use of period trackers appear to fear the worst: dragnet-style searches for anyone who was pregnant and then ceased to be.
    New York Times, 30 June 2022
  • Some workers in Oregon are leaving for job sites as early as 1 a.m. and staying away from check-cashing shops on payday to avoid dragnets.
    Andrea Selsky, The Mercury News, 24 Apr. 2017
  • The subway turnstile — low enough to vault, ubiquitous enough to figure in the lives of millions of New Yorkers each day — has long served as a kind of dragnet for the Police Department.
    J. David Goodman, New York Times, 7 Feb. 2018
  • Here’s the latest on the Hong Kong protests: Opposition lawmakers caught up in widening dragnet.
    BostonGlobe.com, 11 Nov. 2019
  • At the same time, the law enforcement dragnet continues to round up suspects after the events of last week as new and alarming information emerges.
    Dan Balz, Anchorage Daily News, 13 Jan. 2021
  • The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state.
    Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2019
  • Cawthorn slipped away from a police dragnet on Memorial Day, using his dirt bike to flee as officers approached.
    Jessica Anderson, baltimoresun.com, 6 June 2019
  • Throughout the 2000s, the country has constructed the world’s most powerful information dragnet over the web.
    Chang Che, New York Times, 24 Apr. 2023
  • But somehow Gulalai Ismail, a 32-year-old Pakistani women’s rights activist on the run, managed to slip through the dragnet last month and escape to America.
    New York Times, 19 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dragnet.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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