TRUMP TEAM MAPS SWEEPING DEPORTATIONS

• Millions of people living in the United States illegally could be targeted for deportation — including people simply arrested for traffic violations — under a sweeping rewrite of immigration enforcement policies announced Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Any immigrant who is in the country illegally and is charged or convicted of any offence, or even suspected of a crime, will now be an enforcement priority, according to Homeland Security Department memos signed by Secretary John Kelly. That could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor offences.

Immigration authorities also could seek to deport people based on their own judgment that the immigrants represent a risk to public safety or national security, Kelly wrote. He ordered the department to hire 15,000 more border patrol and immigration agents and to begin building a wall on the Mexican border to enact executive orders signed by the president on Jan. 25.

Kelly’s memos don’t cover President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 ban on the entry of foreign travellers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, which was halted by a federal appeals court.

A revised version of the travel ban will be issued “very soon,” Trump said in remarks at the National Museum of African- American History and Culture in Washington, which he toured Tuesday morning.

The memos replace the Obama administration’s more narrow guidance focusing on immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, are considered threats to national security or are recent border crossers.

Kelly’s memos were decried by immigration advocates.

“These memos lay out a detailed blueprint for the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants in America,” Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America’s Voice Education Fund, said Tuesday. “They fulfil the wish lists of the white nationalist and anti- immigrant movements and bring to life the worst of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.”

Kelly’s latest plans call for enforcing a long- standing but obscure provision of immigration law that allows t he government t o send some people caught illegally crossing the Mexican border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

That provision is almost certain to face opposition from civil libertarians and Mexican officials, and it’s unclear whether the United States has the authority to force Mexico to accept t hird- country nationals. But the memo also calls for Homeland Security to provide an account of U. S. aid to Mexico, a possible signal that Trump plans to use that funding to get Mexico to accept the foreigners.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it would challenge the directives.

“These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the well- being of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, i n pursuit of a hyper- aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of t he ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.