Hours after the Trump administration announced Tuesday that it would rescind DACA, the Obama-era program that protects some 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, the president suddenly amended his position on mass deportation. “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do),” he wrote on Twitter, seemingly clarifying that he is, in fact, encouraging lawmakers to codify the policy. “If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!”

The remark was met with confusion online, where journalists struggled to decipher its meaning. Earlier in the day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had described DACA recipients as “mostly adult illegal aliens” that had “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans .” Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke struck a jarringly different tone in a series of memos released in tandem with Sessions’s announcement, describing DACA as well-intentioned but improperly implemented, and calling on Congress “do this the right way.” President Donald Trump, himself, released a statement that hewed more closely to Sessions, aligning himself with “the millions of [U.S. citizens] victimized by this unfair system.” Meanwhile, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders seemed to have it both ways, telling reporters in a briefing Tuesday afternoon that Trump “wants to be able to make a decision with compassion, but at the same time, you can’t allow emotion to govern.”

With his initial statement, Trump gave Congress an ultimatum and a strict deadline: six months to agree on a comprehensive solution to the DACA issue, or suffer the political consequences. The blame for mass deportations of kids, his policy suggested, would put the blame squarely on lawmakers’ shoulders. But in his tweet Tuesday night, Trump seemed to blink, abandoning his leverage by saying he could “revisit” the issue. Lawmakers, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of “Dreamers” whose legal status is in jeopardy, are now left guessing as to what the president believes and what he intends to do. By softening his stance, paradoxically, Trump may have made the situation worse.

The president may not understand the consequences of the action he initiated Tuesday. The New York Times reports that Trump told a confidante over the past few days that he understands he is lodged in an untenable position. And, just one hour before his decision was set to be announced, administration officials apparently expressed concern that the president might not grasp the mosaic implications of his statement, and once he started to see tangible results, he would change his mind. One senior White House aide told Politico that he doesn’t actually expect Trump to follow through on his threat if Republicans fail to agree on a plan.

But the bell Trump sounded Tuesday cannot easily be unrung. As New York’s Margaret Hartmann notes: