Donald Trump has threatened to deport as many as three million undocumented immigrants with immediate effect.

In an interview with CBS programme '60 Minutes', the US President-elect said he was initially targeting any with a criminal record.

However he said his administration was yet to make a decision on the fate of other undocumented immigrants in the US.

When pressed in the interview about what he planned to do about his campaign pledge to ‘deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants’, Trump responded:

“What we are going to do is get the people who are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers - we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could even be three million.

“We are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we are getting them out of our country, they are here illegally.  After the border is secured and after everything gets normalised, we are going to make a determination about the people you’re taking about.”

In the days after his shock victory Trump has seemingly shied away from some of his more incendiary pledges.

For instance his promise to impose a ban on all Muslims entering the US was quietly dropped from his website hours after the victory was announced.

However this appears to be one area where Trump is determined to make good on his threats.