IT’S OFFICIAL: Massive ICE Raids Underway!

Unsurprisingly, many of the Democrat presidential candidates are calling the ICE raids an "inhumane" "political stunt" designed to "terrorize" and "tear apart families."

See what just a few of the Dems running for president are saying about the fulfillment of President Trump's promise to deport those who are refusing to obey U.S. immigration laws:

However, other Americans are striking back at Dems like these to defend and voice their support for the deportations:

Fox News had the following to say about the beginning of the ICE raids and the type of illegal aliens that they are targetting:

A nationwide crackdown to apprehend thousands of illegal immigrants across the country began late Saturday in the nation's largest city and several other places, according to an official.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) resumed its previously announced plan to apprehend thousands of illegal immigrants who've been given orders to leave the country, targeting people in at least 10 cities.  The ICE raids began late Saturday and into the early morning hours on Sunday in "a number of jurisdictions," not just New York City, a senior administration official confirmed to Fox News.

In an exclusive interview on "FOX & friends," Acting ICE Director Matt Albence said while he couldn't speak to anything specifically from an operational perspective, the overarching concern when the agency conducts any sort of enforcement operation is "the safety and security of both our officers that are conducting the operation as well as the public."

“We are doing targeted enforcement actions against specific individuals who have had their day in immigration court and have been ordered to be removed by an immigration judge,” Albence told Fox News’ Griff Jenkins. “We are merely executing those lawfully issued judge's orders.”

Albence, who said using the term raid does everyone "a disservice," added the agency is focusing on people who had had the opportunity to make an asylum claim in front of an immigration judge and chose not to do so or didn't appear for their first hearing. The acting director added that ICE gave those individuals the opportunity back in February to arrange for an orderly process to be removed from the country, but only 3 percent of people responded to letters that were sent out.

"At this point, we have no choice but to go out and execute those lawfully-issued removal orders from an immigration judge," he told "FOX & friends."

In addition to the enforcement operation, ICE also released a report on Sunday meant to illustrate the necessity for removing those who have committed crimes.

The first of what will be quarterly “Declined Detainer Reports” details incidents from the second quarter of fiscal year 2018, where law enforcement agencies arrested undocumented immigrants, ignored ICE requests to hold them until federal authorities could pick them up, and then those individuals were arrested on new charges. The report features highlighted cases, including ones where the arrests were for rape, murder, assault, burglary, car theft, drug possession, and DUI.

In the cases described in the report, three of the individuals were eventually caught by ICE and removed from the U.S., one is believed to again be in law enforcement custody while ICE awaits action on a new detainer, and 12 are believed to still be at large.

In one such case, ICE said an illegal immigrant had been arrested and released 10 times by San Francisco police between February 2018 and January 2019, despite ICE issuing detainers. Each of those arrests included charges related to either burglary or a stolen vehicle.

"That individual is a one-man crime spree," Albence said on "FOX & friends."

The New York Times has more details on the deportation raids:

A small number of coordinated federal raids targeting undocumented migrant parents and their children took place over the weekend, the beginning of the Trump administration’s plan to swiftly enforce deportation orders against some 2,000 recently arrived migrants who are not eligible to remain in the country.

Only a handful of arrests appeared to take place, and they were reported in just a few cities. That was much different than the nationwide show of force that had originally been planned, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were expected to fan out in unison on Sunday morning across immigrant communities in major cities. But the authorities said that more arrests would follow through the week.

The plans for the operation were changed at the last minute because of news reports that had tipped off immigrant communities about what to expect, according to several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. Instead of a large simultaneous sweep, the authorities created a secondary plan for a smaller and more diffuse scale of apprehensions to roll out over roughly a week. Individual ICE field offices were given the discretion to decide when to begin, one official said.

The first reports of ICE activity came in on Friday and Saturday. In Chicago, a mother was apprehended with her daughters, but the family was immediately released under supervision according to a person familiar with the operation. ICE agents approached at least one other home in the area, but the woman inside refused to answer the door, according to local news reports.

In New York, agents attempted two arrests on Saturday in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, and a third in East Harlem, according to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.

A teenager A volunteer with the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights handed out fliers in Atlanta on Sunday to inform people of their rights when faced with ICE or law enforcement officers. The headline warns readers to “Watch out!”CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Timewho lives with her parents in Passaic, N.J., said she was awakened at about 1 a.m. Sunday by a knock on the door from people she believed to be ICE agents. Having seen numerous “know your rights” posts on Instagram, she knew not to open it.

“They said, ‘We need to talk to you, can you come outside, can you open the door?’ I said, ‘Do you have permission to come inside my house, do you have a paper?’” she recounted. “They said, ‘We’re not trying to come inside your house, we just want to speak with you.’ And I said, ‘No I’m not coming outside.”

After some persistence, she said, the door-knockers left. But at 5 a.m., more arrived, now surrounding the house with flashlights and banging on the door and window. Liza ran upstairs to be with her parents, and they hid with the lights off. She said she was “too scared to look outside,” and was unable to see any uniforms the people may have been wearing. Eventually they left again.