Donald Trump’s top border official has said the new Republican administration will launch large operations to detain and deport undocumented immigrants beginning on the day of the United States President-elect’s inauguration on Tuesday.
The incoming administration’s so-called “border czar”, Tom Homan, told Fox News on Saturday that he would not categorise the expected actions as “raids”.
“There are going to be targeted enforcement operations,” he said, adding that Chicago would be among cities that will see raids shortly after Trump takes office for a second four-year term.
Homan also suggested the Trump administration would target city jails in so-called sanctuary cities that house a large number of migrants. He said the government wants to “arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a county jail”.
Homan, a former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said the agency was planning operations carefully and would know which homes to hit.
Amid reports by US media that Chicago could be hit as early as Tuesday by hundreds of border agents and that New York and Miami could also be targets, he did not comment on the exact timing of the operation or elaborate further.
Homan’s latest comments come a day after he said, “We’re gonna take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens.” He had also said there would be a “big raid across the country”.
Just like during his first presidential campaign, Trump has pledged to crack down on undocumented immigrants in his second run. But there have been disagreements on some aspects among Republicans, including surrounding the issue of the H-1B visas.
Trump has pledged he would launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” to quickly remove people without saying exactly how many will be affected.
The president-elect has said he would reinstate a programme to make tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum to await their hearings in Mexico, reinstate a controversial travel ban on Muslim-majority countries from his first term, and end birthright citizenship for US-born children of some noncitizens.
Trump’s officials have been considering how to withhold funds from sanctuary cities that refuse to participate in deportations, even for local authorities who have maintained that they do not have the resources to implement his plan, or are concerned about adverse effects on their communities.
Immigrant rights groups have been bracing for the crackdowns promised by the incoming administration, with some US media reporting “self-deportations” by people who have chosen not to wait for Trump to forcibly remove them.
Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC on Saturday to protest Trump’s inauguration, as activists for women’s rights, racial justice and other causes rallied against incoming policies they say will threaten their constitutional rights during the Republican’s second term.
Some in the crowd wore the pink hats that marked the much larger protest against Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. They wound through downtown amid a light rain, past the White House and towards the Lincoln Memorial along the National Mall for the “People’s March.”
Protests against Trump’s inauguration are smaller this time, in part because the US women’s rights movement seems more fractured, according to many activists, after Trump defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
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