President Donald Trump said in a tweet Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will begin “removing the millions of illegal aliens” who have made their way into the U.S.

Senior White House and ICE officials said they had already planned to ramp up their efforts, but Trump’s choice to publicly announce their plans came as a surprise.

Some ICE officials worry that publicly announcing their usually covert operations could both endanger agents and undermine the effectiveness of their plans, though the acting director of ICE disagrees and says Trump’s tweet did not give any specifics that would put agents at risk.

Experts and ICE officials say that even deporting one million is unrealistic, noting that ICE already lacks the resources to deal with the current influx of immigrants.

Announcement

President Donald Trump announced in a tweet Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will begin “removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States” starting next week.

Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people……. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

Following the announcement, it was reported that ICE officials were surprised by the tweet. According to reports, senior White House and ICE officials said Monday they were not aware that Trump planned to share their enforcement plans on Twitter.

Part of the reason the tweet cames as a surprise for immigration officials is due to the fact that large-scale ICE operations are usually kept secret to avoid tipping off illegal immigrants.

Announcing those kinds of plans publically could potentially jeopardize months of planning that requires secrecy to be effective.

In fact, just last year, Trump threatened the mayor of Oakland, California with criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice after she alerted her residents to a coming raid.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that both current and former ICE officials said that Trump’s unexpected tweet blew the cover for their planned operations.

The officials did not say if Trump’s tweet referenced a specific operation they were planning, but they did confirm that they are preparing to launch a new effort to take thousands of illegal immigrants into custody.

The officials who spoke to the Post also predicted that Trump’s tweet could cause immigrants who are at threat of being deported to leave known addresses in the next few days, which would make it much harder for ICE officials to find and deport people and undermine Trump’s plan to ramp up deportations entirely.

Other experts also worry that publically announcing ICE’s operations could endanger ICE agents. A former senior ICE official told a BuzzFeed News that Trump’s announcement is “putting officer safety at risk,” adding “This is not presidential. This is not leadership.”

Former sr. ICE official on this tweet appearing to tease an operation:



Trump is "putting officer safety at risk. This is not presidential. This is not leadership. But should we at all be surprised anymore?" https://t.co/GMOgOoGsTu — Hamed Aleaziz (@Haleaziz) June 18, 2019

However, the new acting director of ICE, Mark Morgan, said yesterday in an interview with PBS that he did not think Trump’s tweet put agents at risk because it did not give specifics.

“I’m not concerned,” Morgan said. “They’re professionals. They know exactly what they need to do.”

ICE Resources

Another reason Trump’s tweet surprised ICE officials is due to the fact that ICE simply does not have the resources to arrest “millions” of people.

According to estimates from Pew Research Center, in 2017, there were about 10.5 million people who live in the U.S. illegally.

Sources: Pew Research Center

Trump administration officials have specified that the new plan will focus on rounding up the more than one million people who have been given final deportation orders, which means a judge has already ruled they should be deported.

However, even just deporting one million rather than “millions” is a huge task. For context, the record number for deportations in a year was 419,384 in 2012 under former President Barack Obama. Even then, it still took the Obama administration nearly four years to hit the one million mark.

During the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, a total of two million people were deported. In contrast, ICE deported 256,085 people in Fiscal Year 2018, according to data from the agency.

Source: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Already, Trump faces a plethora of challenges. Illegal border crossings are currently at their highest levels in more than a decade.

At the same time, deportations have gone down in recent months, according to the Post, which reported that recent ICE data showed that the agency is averaging around 7,000 deportations a month.

Right now, ICE does not have enough funding or detention space for the current level of detainees, much less nearly quadruple that.

According to the Associated Press, as of June 8, the total number of adult detainees alone was 53,141, despite the fact that the agency is only budgeted for 45,000. Ramping up arrests will just create more detainees.

To complicate matters more, there are not enough ICE agents to carry out the deportations at the rate that Trump has suggested. Currently, there are around 5,000 officers in Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the branch of ICE that carries out deportations.

As a result, experts say that such a large-scale push would be extremely expensive and highly unlikely.

There is also the question of overall effectiveness. In order to even attempt to reach the numbers Trump suggested, agents will have to raid homes individually.

However, in those sweeps, agents work from recent addresses, which could be problematic if their predictions are true, and Trump’s announcement prompted illegal immigrants to leave their current addresses.

Agents also often do not have search warrants, so illegal immigrants are not required to open their doors. As a result, ICE agents usually capture about 30 to 40 percent of targets, according to the Associated Press.

What Next?

While Trump’s annoucement may have come as a surprise, his plans to aggressively pursue mass deportations are not.

Last month, the Post reported that former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and then-acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello left the Trump administration partly because of the fact that they “challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.”

According to Homeland Security officials, the two were concerned about the effectiveness of the plan as well as the public outrage it could cause. Trump pulled Vitiello’s nomination for ICE director back April because he wanted the agency to go in a “tougher direction.”

Already, the new acting director does seem to at least talk tougher. In his first two weeks at the job, Morgan has said publicly that he wants to increase enforcement and go after families with deportation orders.

Again, law enforcement officials are worried about the public backlash, especially when it comes to families.