Mass Arrests Of Undocumented Immigrants To Begin Day After Trump Returns To White House
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will begin their immigration raids from Chicago which is one of hundreds of sanctuaries for immigrants from Tuesday.
A day after President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, the US immigration authorities will begin conducting mass arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country that will last all week.
According to an AFP report, this is the first move Republican Trump is going to make after Monday, to uphold a campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. On Friday, Trump's incoming "border czar" Tom Homan said large-scale raids would be part of Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration which will begin from Chicago on Tuesday.
"There's going to be a big raid across the country. Chicago is just one of many places," said Homan, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who oversaw a policy that separated migrant parents and children at the border under the first Trump administration.
He said that ICE is “finally going to go out and do their jobs”. He said ICE is going to enforce the “immigration law without apology”. ICE will concentrate on the worst first, public safety threats. Homan said that no one is off the table.
“If they're in the country illegally, they got a problem," AFP quoted Homan.
The "large-scale immigration raid" in Chicago was expected to begin on Tuesday, the day after Trump's inauguration, and would "last all week," involving 100 to 200 ICE officers, according to four unnamed sources familiar with the operation's planning.
Chicago is one of the hundreds of sanctuary cities and counties in the US, which typically prohibit local resources from being used to support federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Don Terry, a Chicago police spokesman, told the New York Times, that the department would not “intervene or interfere with any other government agencies performing their duties,” but said that it “does not document immigration status” and, following municipal code, “will not share information with federal immigration authorities.”
Both Homan and Trump have pledged to execute the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. However, the plan is expected to encounter legal and logistical challenges, including the issue of where to house millions they will detain.
During his first administration, Trump had a "zero tolerance" policy that separated more than 5,000 children from parents who crossed the border, without systems to track and reunite families.
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