WASHINGTON—The Trump administration sought to allay fears in immigrant communities Tuesday as it publicly released wide-ranging new guidelines that allow federal authorities to take stronger enforcement actions against illegal immigrants, saying the directives are not intended to produce mass deportations.Read the latest news on U.S. President Donald TrumpFederal officials cautioned that many of the changes detailed in a pair of memos signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly will take time to implement and that other policies that grant agents and officers greater powers will be used with care and discretion.Kelly’s memos, first disclosed in media reports over the weekend, establish new policies at the Department of Homeland Security to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents, expand the pool of immigrants who are prioritized for removal, speed up deportation hearings and enlist local law enforcement to help make arrests.“We do not need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters to formally release the memos to the public.“We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”Immigrant rights groups have expressed concern that the new policies will lead to widespread enforcement raids and abuses by federal authorities as they seek to ramp up deportations of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. The memos are intended as an implementation blueprint for DHS to follow through on three executive orders Trump signed in January to pursue construction of a border wall, beef up patrols along th ...
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