Trump orders ICE to expand deportations in largest cities, including New York and Chicago
President Donald Trump directed federal officials to expand efforts to deport migrants in the largest U.S. cities in the face of protests and court challenges, even as his administration is looking to ease the impact of the crackdown on key sectors of the American workforce.
“ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” Trump said in a post to social media on Sunday.
“In order to achieve this, we 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,” he added.
Trump’s move to ramp up immigration enforcement in big Democratically controlled cities comes a week after the president acknowledged the impact his deportation agenda has had in rural communities hit hard by the loss of agricultural workers. The president said he would craft policy changes to cover farm and hotel industry workers, recognizing concerns from business leaders regarding some critical sectors of the country’s labor force.
Trump campaigned on carrying out the largest deportation in U.S. history and has moved swiftly to deliver on the agenda with a sweeping series of orders and stepped-up raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this month, ICE said it was arresting 2,000 undocumented people a day, a big jump from the numbers that were typical under former President Joe Biden.
Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide and an architect of the administration’s hardline policies, told ICE officials in a tense meeting last month that arrests should average a minimum of 3,000 a day. Data earlier this month showed the U.S. workforce shrank in May, partly because of the largest back-to-back decline in the number of foreign workers in the labor force since 2020.
Trump’s latest call, delivered as he traveled to the Group of Seven leaders’ summit in Canada, follows days of unrest in Los Angeles over the mass deportations.
The protests in LA, sparked by increasingly aggressive ICE raids, escalated following Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops to help quell violence in the city over the objections of the city’s mayor and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Trump also deployed as many as 700 active-duty Marines, who have been given orders to protect federal property and officers.
Newsom has sued the administration arguing that the National Guard deployment exceeded Trump’s authority. While a lower court issued an order that would limit the use of National Guard troops to respond to the protests, a federal appeals court panel is reviewing that decision.Over the weekend, protesters rallied in hundreds of U.S. cities to denounce what they said were Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, including the increased deportations and tactics used to carry them out.