Making good on a key campaign promise, the administration of President Donald Trump has begun detaining illegal migrants in the sanctuary city of Denver, the Daily Mail reported.
Initial arrests began Monday not long after Trump officially took the oath of office, starting with illegal immigrants with pending criminal cases across Colorado.
John Fabbricatore, a former Denver field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, praised the initial efforts.
"ICE agents are doing their job, the job they should have been doing for the last four years. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation where they are using all the agents they have at their disposal."
He added that officials had planned the raids well in advance and had done their research on each of the people rounded up but the previous administration had prevented them from acting.
"These cases were already in the hopper. They've done the surveillance on them, they have good case notes, and they're just hitting those cases that they were not allowed to hit prior," Fabbricatore said.
"There were these priorities that were put out that limited you, like you couldn't go after DUIs. You couldn't go after a basic drug possession.
"The Biden administration made these priorities that kept you from going after criminals," he said.
Denver has prided itself in being defiant of Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration. In November, Mayor Mike Johnston, told Denverite that Denver residents would likely resist a mass deportation effort.
"[Y]ou would have 50,000 Denverites there. It's like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?
"You'd have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them," he said.
Trump made illegal immigration and its impact on society a key issue of his campaign, promising to conduct mass deportations of illegal immigrants once elected.
"We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country," Trump said in October during a speech in Los Angeles. "And we're going to start with Springfield [Ohio] and Aurora [Colorado]."
On Tuesday, the first full day of Trump's second term, border czar Tom Homan said, "In the last 24 hours, ICE arrested over 308 serious criminals."