Immigration authorities have begun conducting raids, a senior administration official said Sunday, in an operation expected to target about 2,000 undocumented immigrants ordered by courts to be removed from the country.

The raids, which will focus on recent arrivals to the country, are slated for Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco, a senior immigration official said. New Orleans is also on the list, but the city tweeted last week that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it would suspend operations through the weekend in areas hit by Tropical Storm Barry, which weakened to a tropical depression Sunday.

As of early Sunday evening, there weren’t any confirmed reports of migrants being apprehended in Baltimore, Chicago or New York, immigrant advocacy groups in those cities told CNN.

“For the most part, it’s quiet,” Cara Yi, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said. “We’ve been dispatching rapid response teams out to meet with people who have reported ICE activity over our hotline. None have been confirmed as of yet.”

Most of the reports were about sightings of government vehicles, Yi said, but advocates had confirmed they were not ICE.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New York said earlier on Twitter that it had received “some reports of ICE at subway stations, but none have been substantiated.”

Acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli took issue with referring to the targets of the raids as undocumented.

“They’re not undocumented. They’ve got a court order on a piece of paper – federal order – that says they’ve gotten due process, and (there are) over a million people with removal orders. That’s the pool that ICE is drawing from,” he told CNN.

ICE will not comment on operational details of the raids, Cuccinelli said, adding that the priority will be apprehending violent criminals and aggravated felons. ICE agents are not “utilising” allegations of crossing the border illegally, a misdemeanor, as cause for arrest in the raids, he said.

Asked if children would be separated from their parents, Cuccinelli said that information constituted an operational detail. But he did say families are among the 1 million people facing removal orders. (CNN)

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