Several large cities are reportedly expected to come under Trump’s immigration enforcement shortly after his inauguration.
Donald Trump’s top border official said the new Republican administration will launch large-scale operations to detain and deport illegal immigrants starting on the US President-elect’s inauguration on Tuesday.
Tom Homan, dubbed the incoming administration’s “border czar,” told Fox News on Saturday that he would not classify the expected actions as “raids.”
“There will be targeted enforcement,” he said, adding that Chicago will be among the cities that will see raids soon after Trump takes office for a second four-year term.
Homan also suggested that the Trump administration target city jails in so-called sanctuary cities that house large immigrant populations. He said the government wanted to “arrest a bad man in the safety and security of the county jail.”
Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said the agency plans operations carefully and will know which homes it will bomb.
Amid US media reports that hundreds of border guards may be attacked in Chicago on Tuesday and that New York and Miami could also be targets, he did not comment on the exact timing of the operation or explain further.
Homan’s latest comments come a day after he said, “We will take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go arrest criminal aliens.” He also said that there would be a “big raid across the country.”
As during his first presidential campaign, Trump pledged to crack down on illegal immigrants in his second run. But there have been disagreements on some aspects among Republicans, including surrounding the issue of H-1B visas.
Trump pledged to launch “the largest internal deportation operation in American history” to quickly remove people, without specifying exactly how many would be affected.
The president-elect said he would reinstate a program to make tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum wait for hearings in Mexico, reimpose a controversial travel ban on Muslim-majority countries starting in his first term, and end birthright citizenship for those born in the United States. Children of some non-citizens.
Trump officials have been considering how to withhold funds from sanctuary cities that refuse to participate in deportations, even for local authorities that have confirmed they do not have the resources to implement his plan, or are concerned about negative impacts on their communities.
Immigrant rights groups are bracing for crackdowns promised by the incoming administration, with some US media reporting on “self-deportations” by people who chose not to wait for Trump to forcibly deport them.
Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to protest Trump’s inauguration, as activists for women’s rights, racial justice and other issues rallied against upcoming policies they say will threaten their constitutional rights during the Republican’s second term.
Some of the crowd wore the pink hats that marked the much larger protest against Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. They raced through downtown in a light rain, past the White House toward the Lincoln Memorial along the National Mall to participate in the “People’s March.”
Protests against Trump’s inauguration are smaller this time around, in part because the American women’s rights movement appears more divided, according to many activists, after Trump’s victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.