AFP – United States (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 tomorrow, to uphold a campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
The remarks 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 on Tuesday.
“There’s going to be a big raid across the country. Chicago is just one of many places,” said former acting director Homan 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.
