US Nationwide Crackdown on Immigrants Underway

A nationwide nationwide crackdown on immigrants facing deportation has kicked off this morning in the US.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the crackdown is already underway, but noted that his city would not cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

However, de Balsio explained that the ICE did not succeed in rounding up any residents of Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood and Harlem.

According to AP, immigrants who've been given orders to leave the country are government targets in at least 10 cities.

Earlier, President Donald Trump has said on Twitter that his agents plan to arrest millions of immigrants in the country illegally.

On his part, the head of ICE Matthew Albence  said that the sweeping operations will target people with final deportation orders on 10 major court dockets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. Albence said that doesn't mean arrests will be limited to certain areas. Authorities will go where their investigations lead, even if it's five states away from where the case is filed.

President Trump tweeted recently that authorities were "focused on criminals as much as we can before we do anything else."

US authorities are "Going to take people out and they're going to bring them back to their countries or they're going to take criminals out, put them in prison, or put them in prison in the countries they came from," he said.

The operation further inflamed the political debate over immigration as Trump appeals to his base with a pledge to crack down on migrants and Democrats cast the president and his administration as inhumane for going after families.

Administration officials have said they are targeting about 2,000 people, which would yield about 200 arrests based on previous crackdowns.

The operation will target entire families that have been ordered removed, but some family may be separated if some members are in the country legally. Albence gave a hypothetical example of a father and child in the U.S. illegally but a mother who isn't.

"If the mother wants to return voluntarily on her own with the family, she'll have an opportunity to do so," he said.

Families may be temporarily housed in hotels until they can be transferred to a detention center or deported. If ICE runs out of space, it may be forced to separate some family members, Albence said. The government has limited space in its family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, activists ramped up efforts to prepare by circulating information about hotlines and planning public demonstrations. Vigils outside of detention centers and hundreds of other locations nationwide were set for Friday evening, to be followed by protests Saturday in Miami and Chicago.