UNITED STATES President Donald Trump directed federal immigration officials on Sunday to prioritise deportations from Democratic-run cities.

The extraordinary move comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

President Trump in a social media posting called on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Programme in History.”

He added that to reach the goal, officials “must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where millions upon millions of Illegal aliens reside.”

Each city is Democratic Party controlled.

Mr Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Mr Trump’s immigration policies, said Ice officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Mr Trump’s second term.

At the same time, the Trump administration has directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, after Mr Trump expressed alarm about the impact aggressive enforcement is having on those industries, according to a US official familiar with the matter who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Protests over federal immigration enforcement raids have continued to flare around the country in places such as Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

Mr Trump is being forced to grapple with the impact his mass deportation effort is having on key industries that rely on migrant workers.

The US president posted on his Truth Social site last Thursday that he heard from hotel, agriculture and leisure industries that his “very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them” and promised that changes would be made.