WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
At the same time, the Trump administration has directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, after Trump expressed alarm about the impact aggressive enforcement is having on those industries, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Protests over federal immigration enforcement raids have been flaring up around the country.
Opponents of Trump’s immigration policies took to the streets as part of the “no kings” demonstrations Saturday that came as Trump held a massive parade in Washington for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.
Saturday’s protests were mostly peaceful.
But police in Los Angeles used tear gas and crowd-control munitions to clear out protesters after the event ended.
Officers in Portland, Oregon, also fired tear gas and projectiles to disperse a crowd that protested in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building well into the evening.
Trump made the call for stepped up enforcement in Democratic-controlled cities on social media as he was making his way to the Group of Seven economic summit in Alberta, Canada.
He suggested to reporters as he departed the White House for the G7 on Sunday evening that his decision to deploy National Guard troops to Los Angeles was the reason the protests in that city went peacefully.
“If we didn’t have the National Guard on call and ready, they would rip Los Angeles apart,” Trump said.
The shift also come as Trump is grappling with the impact his mass deportation effort is having on key industries that rely on workers in the country illegally.
Trump posted on his Truth Social site Thursday that he heard from hotel, agriculture and leisure industries that his “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them” and promised that changes would be made .
That same day Tatum King, an official with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, wrote to regional leaders telling them to halt investigations of the agriculture industry, including meatpackers, as well as of restaurants and hotels, according to the U.S. official.
