US immigration authorities will carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country on Tuesday, a top border official in the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said.
The move would be among the first by Republican Trump, who returns to the White House on Monday, to uphold a campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
The remarks on Friday by Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan to Fox News came in response to reports in the Wall Street Journal and other US outlets that Trump’s new administration planned to carry out an “immigration raid” in Chicago beginning 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.
“On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to go out and do their job. We’re going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens,” he said in the interview.
“What we’re telling ICE, you’re going to enforce the immigration law without apology. You’re going to concentrate on the worst first, public safety threats first, but no one is off the table. If they’re in the country illegally, they got a problem,” Homan added.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the “large-scale immigration raid” in Chicago was expected to start on Tuesday, a day after Trump’s inauguration, would “last all week” and would involve 100 to 200 ICE officers, citing four unnamed people familiar with the operation’s planning.
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 he said the department “does not document immigration status” and “will not share information with federal immigration authorities.”
Midwestern Chicago is one of several Democrat-led US cities that have declared themselves “sanctuaries” for migrants — meaning they will not be arrested solely for not having legal immigrant status.
A Trump representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.