WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday delayed plans for nationwide raids to deport undocumented families, but threatened to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents resume the raids in two weeks if Democrats do not submit to changes in asylum law they have long opposed.
Immigration agents were planning to sweep into immigrant communities in 10 major cities on Sunday in coordinated raids. Officials said on Friday that they would target about 2,000 families in a show of force aimed at enforcing immigration laws.
If the plans had gone forward, some immigrant children — many of whom are American citizens because they were born in the United States — would have faced the possibility of being forcibly separated from their families when ICE agents arrived to arrest and deport their undocumented parents.
Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists had demanded that the raids be stopped, calling them a cruel attack on minority communities whose only crime was illegally entering the country. Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday called the raids “heartless” and urged Mr. Trump to “stop this brutal action.”
The president did that a few hours later, saying in his tweet that “at the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks.”
But Mr. Trump made clear that he planned to use the looming threat of family deportations as a cudgel to try to extract concessions from Democratic lawmakers in his long-running battle over changes to immigration laws.
That threat has the potential to set up a fierce legislative battle during the next two weeks as the president and Democrats on Capitol Hill clash over Mr. Trump’s demands to drastically limit opportunities for migrants from Central America and other areas to apply for asylum in the United States.