Trump plans to intensify immigration enforcement soon after inauguration

WASHINGTON: Immigration authorities of the United States will carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country on Tuesday, a top border official of the incoming President-elect Donald Trump administration has said. 

The arrests would be among one of the first moves taken by Trump, who is set to return to the White House on Monday, to uphold a pledge to deport millions of illegal immigrants from the US. 

Trump's incoming "border czar" Tom Homan remarked to Fox News in response to reports from the Wall Street Journal and other US media outlets that the president-elect's new administration planned to carry out an "immigration raid" in Chicago beginning on Tuesday, which will be Trump's second day in the office. 

"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 WSJ 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.

A Chicago police spokesperson Don Terry 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.