Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot stated Wednesday that her metropolis has completely banned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from accessing the Chicago Police Department’s databases forward of looming ICE raids to detain undocumented immigrants.
Chicago police “will not team up with ICE to detain any resident,” the mayor stated after assembly with enterprise leaders and immigration rights advocates at Lurie Children’s Hospital. “They’re not going to be facilitating or otherwise providing any assistance in any raids ― whether it’s traffic stops [or] additional support. … We have also cut off ICE from any access from any CPD databases and that will remain permanent.”
On June 22, President Donald Trump introduced that he would delay his plans for mass deportation roundups in at the least 10 main cities, together with Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago. He tweeted that he hoped the two-week delay would enable Democrats to “work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”
But The New York Times reported early Thursday that ICE officers plan to launch nationwide raids as quickly as this weekend to arrest 1000’s of immigrants the federal authorities has ordered deported.
“The two-weeks clock is up, which is what the president had given,” Lightfoot stated Wednesday. “We’ve heard some notion that it may start again.”
Before Trump’s first planned raid in June, Lightfoot stated the Chicago Police Department would not cooperate with ICE, although Wednesday was the first time she stated the metropolis would completely ban ICE from accessing police databases.
“Chicago is and will always be a welcoming city that will never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart,” she stated. “I don’t want our immigrant residents to be fearful of being in Chicago. I don’t want people not going to work, pursuing their daily activities or their children being fearful that their parents or guardians are gonna be taken from them.”