US President Donald Trump described his administration's moves to deport illegal immigrants as a military operation.
Trump has used a series of executive orders to chip away at the barriers to deportations and hire new law enforcement officials to spearhead the effort, using the Department of Homeland Security(DHS) to live up to the President's tough talk on undocumented immigration during the 2016 campaign.
"We're getting really bad dudes out of this country, and at a rate that nobody's ever seen before and they're the bad ones. And it's a military operation." CNN quoted Trump as saying.
Under the administration's guidelines, any immigrant who is convicted, charged or suspected of a crime is considered a priority for removal.
That is a break from Obama administration policy, which focused on serious criminals, recent border crossers and suspected terrorist
Earlier, following through on Trump's promise of tightening the borders and putting a stop to illegal immigration, the United States administration announced new directives under which undocumented migrants will be an enforcement priority, however, insisting the measures are not intended to produce "mass deportations."
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The Department of Homeland Security has released memos regarding the implementation of two of the President's executive orders that are designed to protect the homeland.
These two memos provide explicit guidance to DHS staff on how to carry out two executive orders signed by the President on January 25th- one dealing with interior enforcement and one with border security.
Trump had taken a hard line against illegal immigration during his campaign, at times suggesting he would seek to create a nationwide "deportation force" to expel as many of the nation's millions of unauthorized immigrants as possible.