As major US cities braced for looming raids on undocumented migrants subject to deportation orders, Donald Trump told reporters: “It starts during the course of this next week, maybe a little earlier than that.”
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that an operation slated to launch before dawn on Sunday would target up to 2,000 families in as many as 10 cities. The Miami Herald said those cities were Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco.
Acting Ice director Mark Morgan said this week the agency would target families that have received a removal order from a US immigration court.
On Saturday the president also said the agency concerned, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or Ice, was focused on removing the MS-13 criminal gang.
Trump frequently seeks to link undocumented migration to concerns over crime, without citing evidence. The MS-13 gang, a common focus for him, formed among Salvadoran migrants on the American west coast in the 1980s before spreading across the US and Central America. It has a reputation for brutality, which critics of the president say is only boosted by his focus upon it.
On Saturday, Trump also repeated his determination that “people that came into the country illegally … they are going to be removed from the country”.
In cities where raids are expected, immigrant and advocacy groups are preparing to respond. The raids are expected to be similar to those operations that have been carried out since 2003, which often produce hundreds of arrests. Trump, however, announced on Monday that this week’s raids are the start of an effort to deport millions, a near-impossibility given limited resources.
It is also unusual – if not without precedent – for families to be targeted instead of migrants with criminal histories.
On Friday, Camille Mackler, the director of immigration legal policy at the New York Immigration Council (NYIC) told the Guardian: “We have spent the last two and a half years learning how to respond to these situations, teaching our communities how to respond and creating materials with how to support them.”
Her group, she said, has ramped up education and awareness efforts, advising those who have received a deportation order to contact a lawyer and telling people to make a plan for their family in case they are arrested.
“We know how to respond to these raids,” she said.
Advocates also said Trump’s move was timed to coincide with his launch this week of his re-election campaign.
Sandra Cordero, the director of Families Belong Together, a coalition fighting family separations, called the raids “a disgusting political ploy to stoke fear and rile up Trump’s base for 2020”.
Among civic leaders to criticise Trump’s move, Houston police chief Art Acevedo said Ice officials had declined to provide information about the expected operation. Trump’s tweets on the subject, he said, “instil fear”.
“We rely on the cooperation of that population to keep all Americans safe, all residents safe, and all members of society safe,” Acevedo said. “When you say you’re going to go arrest millions of people, that has a chilling effect on [that] cooperation.”
At the White House, Trump said: “Some cities are going to fight it but if you notice they’re generally high-crime cities. If you look at Chicago, they’re fighting it … and many of those cities are high-crime cities and they’re sanctuary cities.”
Sanctuary cities do not co-operate with federal efforts to deport undocumented migrants, of whom there are around 11m in the US as a whole.
Trump praised Florida governor Ron DeSantis for his policies against sanctuary cities, and claimed: “People are tired of sanctuary cities and what it does and the crime it brings. They’re very tired of it.”
