Jeh Johnson, who served as secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama, said there is nothing unusual with the upcoming raids from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that are targeting illegal immigrants who have orders for deportation.

"Deportations occur all the time. Of those who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge, hopefully after they have exhausted their appeal rights and had an opportunity to have their asylum case heard, we simply have to enforce the law, particularly if someone has been ordered deported," Johnson said on Morning Joe Friday.

"In other words, they’ve exhausted all their appeal rights. And so, it's important for migrants to know they have rights. But enforcement actions themselves are not extraordinary," he added.

Johnson has been a unique voice in speaking out against Democrats' recent rhetoric on immigration. When Democrats started to criticize the Trump administration for keeping migrants in "cages," Johnson said that practice did not begin when Trump became president.

“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on Jan. 20, 2017, OK?" he said.

He also called out the 2020 Democrats' proposal to decriminalize border crossing because that "is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders."