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US immigration authorities began making arrests in Chicago on Sunday that targeted undocumented residents living in the “sanctuary city”.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed on social media site X that its agents, along with several federal agencies including the FBI, had begun operations in the Midwestern city. Border tsar Tom Homan was in Chicago for the raid, as was acting deputy attorney-general Emil Bove.
The operation targeted about 270 “known criminals”, according to television personality Phil McGraw, who was accompanying ICE officials and agents at their command centre in Chicago and livestreaming events for his channel Merit TV.
Donald Trump made immigration the central issue of his campaign and promised “mass deportations”. Chicago has been on edge for more than a week after news outlets reported the administration’s plans for raids, with fewer people venturing outside in heavily immigrant neighbourhoods.
Just under a fifth of metro Chicago’s population was born outside the US, according to the US Census, a grouping that includes people with immigration statuses ranging from naturalised citizens to undocumented. Mexicans comprise the largest group born outside the US, followed by people from India and Poland.
About 52,000 immigrants have arrived in the city since August 2022, when Texas governor Greg Abbott began busing people from the border to Chicago, among other Democrat-controlled cities.
As a sanctuary city since the 1980s, Chicago has adopted policies that limit co-operation with federal authorities to enforce immigration law.
The City Council voted this month to reject a proposal that would have weakened those protections, and the Chicago Transit Authority is displaying ads at train and bus stations that direct riders to the city’s “Know Your Rights” website, which lays out how to interact with immigration authorities.
Homan has talked in recent months about “collateral” arrests, detaining undocumented people if they are in the presence of someone ICE has a warrant to arrest. That would violate a 2022 court settlement and could make residents of certain states who are detained in such warrantless arrests eligible for immediate release from custody.
On Sunday, Homan agreed when McGraw, also known as “Dr Phil”, suggested that collateral arrests were the result of local authorities refusing to co-operate with ICE, prompting federal agents to make arrests in city neighbourhoods.
“That’s the game they want to play, game on, we’re going to do it,” said Homan.
Immigration advocates fear the executive orders Trump issued last week constitute a large-scale attempt to dismantle due process protections.
Expedited removal, which is the deportation of people without a judicial hearing or legal counsel, typically applies to people detained within 100 miles of the US border.
Trump is attempting to extend it throughout the country for anyone who cannot prove to an ICE agent’s satisfaction that they have resided in the US for at least two years.
Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director for the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center, said many of the orders violated US law and the constitution.
Trump’s rhetoric of “familiar cruelty and dehumanisation . . . now paired with the full force of the executive branch and Congress, will unleash profound suffering on our longtime immigrant neighbours and people who have arrived more recently to seek refuge”, she said.
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