A cornerstone of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign was a mass deportation plan that Trump said would be the largest in American history. Now that the election is over, many are wondering what that plan would look like.

“There is an extremely high level of concern,” Denver City Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said. “I would say people are nervous. A large majority of my voters are at their wits’ end.”

Denver7 Investigates brought the concerns of the city councilwoman and many other Coloradans to John Fabbricatore, the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field director for Colorado and Wyoming.

Since his retirement two years ago, Fabbricatore remains connected to developments on the U.S. border and closely follows the Trump campaign’s proposals. He regularly visits the border, where he has been nine times since he retired. He also recently finalized his bid for Congress in Colorado’s 6th District as the Republican nominee, finishing behind incumbent Jason Crow.

Fabbricatore acknowledged those concerns and hopes to allay them, saying the first step would be to address non-citizen criminals and national security cases.

“My goal is to really lower the temperature on what’s going on,” he said. “I really believe that a lot of people look at this and think that there will be checkpoints and there will be immigration officers pulling people out of cars because they are of a different ethnicity. . That’s not what I think.” immigration officials will do it.

But Fabbricatore acknowledges that concerns will persist. Alvidrez, who has heard these concerns from her constituents, also said she hears them at home from her own son.

“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Is Trump coming to Denver to take all my new classmates?'” she said.

Fabbricatore, however, said the effort would be legal, lawful and humanitarian, with the focus on criminals.

“We will go after criminals and threats to national security first, and we already know who many of them are,” he said. “We know who they are. We know they are criminally involved in crimes in the United States and they are subject to deportation.”

Fabbricatore said the federal government knows that more than 600,000 convicted and accused felons live in the United States as non-citizens.

“We know that 13,000 people have been convicted of homicide out of that group of 600,000. There are more than 18,000 people convicted of sexual offenses,” he said.

Alvidrez said she thought Fabbricatore’s comments calmed the waters and brought clarity.

“Let’s make sure we build a coalition,” she said. “This is not the time for hatred, this is not the time for divisions. This is a time to be neighborly and come together as a community to make sure everyone feels welcome and safe.

Fabbricatore stressed that he is not opposed to immigration, but that it must be done through legal means. He also said that because of the scale of the number of non-citizens convicted, the process would take years and require a significant commitment in terms of man hours and money.

“I am entirely for legal immigration. The United States is a melting pot and we should have a good process for people coming to this country,” he said. “But they have to be examined and it has to be legal.”

Denver7