Trump defends ICE: 'I think they haven't gone far enough'
President Trump defended raids conducted and tactics used by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers this year, saying he believes "they haven't gone far enough."
In a clip of his "60 Minutes" interview shared on Sunday evening, CBS News's Norah O'Donnell asked the president if he believed some raids had gone too far after videos surfaced of agents using tear gas in a Chicago residential neighborhood and smashing car windows.
"No. I think they haven't gone far enough, because we've been held back by judges — by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama, " Trump responded.
When O'Donnell asked if he was "OK with those tactics," Trump responded, "Well, yeah, because you have to get the people out."
"You have to look at the people. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are people thrown out of their countries because they were, you know, criminals," he added, also saying his administration was deporting them.
"You promised in your campaign that you were going to deport the worst of the worst — violent criminals, rapists, " O'Donnell said, with Trump responding, "We're doing that. That's what we're doing."
"But a lot of the people that your administration has arrested and deported aren't violent criminals: landscapers, nannies, construction workers, farmworkers, the families of service members," O'Donnell rebutted.
"Landscapers who are criminals, yeah," Trump responded.
"Is it your intent to deport people without a criminal record?" O'Donnell asked Trump.
"We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be that 'You came into the country illegally, you're going to go out,'" Trump said. "However, you've also seen, 'You're going to go out. We're going to work with you, and you're going to come back into our country legally.'"
Since returning to the White House, Trump has increased immigration raids nationwide, sending masked federal agents into some “sanctuary cities” in an effort to deport immigrants allegedly in the country illegally.
Cities such as Chicago and Boston have seen a significant increase in immigration enforcement operations beginning this week, and Department of Homeland Security sources say ICE is “everywhere.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have slammed Trump's immigration operations in their states.
Recently, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie (D) condemned the reported deployment of federal immigration officers to his city, saying it would incite “chaos and violence,” rather than reduce crime.
“In cities across the country, masked immigration officials are deployed to use aggressive enforcement tactics that instill fear, so people don’t feel safe going about their daily lives,” Lurie said in a nine-minute video statement.