WASHINGTON -- The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in recent days has bulked up the branch responsible for carrying out deportations in preparation for the mass arrests, two Department of Homeland Security officials said Tuesday, adding that the agency could not immediately deport "millions of illegal aliens" as President Donald Trump had promised the night before.
Trump tweeted late Monday that immigration agents "will begin deporting the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States ... as fast as they come in," and he called on congressional Democrats to address the "border crisis."
Senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have signaled for weeks that the agency would conduct raids targeting thousands of families in homes and communities, something one of the homeland security officials confirmed Tuesday was expected in the coming weeks.
The agency has requested that agents in Homeland Security Investigations -- the branch of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that conducts long-term investigations into human trafficking and drug smuggling -- assist Enforcement and Removal Operations, which deports people illegally in the country, according to the two homeland security officials. They said the nationwide reallocation of resources was rare and a sign that the immigration agency would soon conduct mass arrests.
But agents were not clear what specifically Trump was referring to in his tweet Monday.
A president releasing the timeline of such raids would be unprecedented because it could spread panic in communities and potentially threaten the success of the raids.
Last year, Trump administration officials blasted Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for warning people about an impending immigration raid, saying she endangered agents' safety.
"The Oakland mayor's decision to publicize her suspicions about ICE operations further increased that risk for my officers and alerted criminal aliens -- making clear that this reckless decision was based on her political agenda with the very federal laws that ICE is sworn to uphold," then-agency deputy director Thomas Homan said at the time.
Schaaf responded late Monday to the president's tweet.
"If you continue to threaten, target and terrorize families in my community ... and if we receive credible information ... you already know what our values are in Oakland -- and we will unapologetically stand up for those values," she wrote.
Meanwhile, officials said an operation targeting families would not immediately result in the deportation of millions of people. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly about the details of the coming operation or Trump's tweet.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency charters planes that carry only a couple of hundred people back to Central America daily.
While roughly 1 million foreigners have been issued removal orders, many of them may be appealing their cases and cannot be deported. The roughly 6,000 deportation officers in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency also do not know the locations of many of the migrants.
The agency already has been stretched increasingly thin by the near-record influx at the southern border, chiefly from Central America, over the past year, leaving fewer agents to enforce deportation orders.
Last fiscal year, Enforcement and Removal Operations deported more than 250,000 people. Under President Barack Obama, the annual number of deportations peaked in 2012 at about 410,000.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have changed their minds multiple times in recent days about when to begin the operation to target families, according to one of the homeland security officials. The agency has long been hesitant about such raids because of the bad optics they generate.
On Tuesday afternoon, the immigration agency released a statement saying it was committed to enforcing immigration law, including "routine targeted enforcement operations, criminals, individuals subject to removal orders and work site enforcement."
This month Immigration and Customs Enforcement's acting director, Mark Morgan, told reporters that the agency would increase efforts to deport people who missed a court hearing or otherwise received a deportation order. He specified that this would include families.
While agency officials argue that adults in the U.S. without permission who have been given a final order of removal should be deported quickly, the idea of rounding up and deporting those who have children in the United States has been fraught for years. Many families include a parent illegally in the country and a child who is a citizen and cannot be deported.
Information for this article was contributed by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times; by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post; and by Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times.
A Section on 06/19/2019