US immigration authorities will carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country on Tuesday, a senior border official in Donald Trump’s new administration said.
The move would be one of the first by Republican Trump, who returns to the White House on Monday, to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
Remarks made Friday by Trump’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan, to Fox News came in response to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other U.S. media outlets that the new Trump administration was considering a “immigration raid” in Chicago starting Tuesday.
“There’s going to be a big raid across the country. Chicago is just one place of many,” said Homan, 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.
“On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to come out and do its job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them arrest criminal aliens,” he said in the interview.
“What we’re saying to ICE is you’re going to enforce immigration law without excuses. You’re going to focus on the worst threats first, public safety threats first, but no one “If they are in the country illegally, they have a problem,” Homan added.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the “large-scale immigration raid” in Chicago was scheduled to begin Tuesday, a day after Trump’s inauguration, would “last all week” and involve 100 to 200 ICE agents, citing four anonymous people close to the planning of the operation.
Don Terry, a Chicago police spokesman, told the New York Times that the department “will not intervene or interfere with other government agencies in the performance of their duties.”
But he said the department “does not document immigration status” and “will not share information with federal immigration authorities.”
Midwestern Chicago is one of several Democratic-led U.S. cities that have declared themselves “sanctuaries” for migrants, meaning they won’t be arrested just because they don’t have immigration status. legal immigrant.
A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
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