President Trump's threatened deportation raids are "absolutely going to happen," says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.

"There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders," the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. "Of course, that isn't what ICE will go after in this, but that's the pool of people that have been all the way through the process."

The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.

On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids "for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!"

As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be "starting fairly soon."

"I don't call them 'raids.' I say they came in illegally, and we're bringing them out legally," Trump said. "We're removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country."