Donald don't do this number—

—it's the only one you own...

There was a pretty funky smell, I thought, to the remarks on NPR of acting ICE director Mark Morgan on the subject of his agency's plan for a big sweep of some thousands of undocumented immigrant families starting Sunday:

"My duty is not to look at the political optics, or the will [of] the American people, that's for the politicians to decide," Morgan said. "What the American people should want us to do as law enforcement officials is to enforce the rule of law and maintain the integrity of that system."

Did he mean there was some special reason for enforcing the rule of law this weekend, as opposed to the rest of the time? Launched Monday by an out-of-the-blue presidential tweet (the night before he officially opened his reelection bid in Orlando)?

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

No politics there for sure! Though there did seem to be some kind of alleged reason, in Morgan's telling:

ICE sent letters to more than 2,000 of these migrants in February, demanding that they report to immigration authorities, or leave the country. Morgan said many are not turning themselves in.

"So what are our options?" he said. "They've had due process, they've had access to attorneys, they've had access to interpreters. Majority of them don't even show up. And then when they didn't show up, they received ordered removal in absentia," Morgan said. "We have no choice."

So it would be just targeting the "many of them" or "majority of them", as the case may be, who failed to answer these summonses, and a decision that four months was giving them enough time. But no explanation for the wave of publicity, at odds with the normal ICE practice of setting these things up quietly:

Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.

And then it turned out (Nick Miroff, Washington Post) that there were only about 150 families who had failed to report, and two distinct plans in competition with each other, one favored by acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan to target just these people, and one favored by Emperor Trump undercutting his own secretary:

McAleenan has warned that an indiscriminate operation to arrest migrants in their homes and at work sites risks separating children from their parents in cases where the children are at day care, summer camp or friend’s houses. He also has maintained that ICE should not devote major resources to carrying out a mass interior sweep while telling lawmakers it needs emergency funding to address the crisis at the U.S. border.

Trump has been determined to go forward with the family operation after tweeting Monday that the immigration raids were coming next week as a first step toward his pledge for “millions” of deportations. The White House has been in direct communication with acting ICE director Mark Morgan and other ICE officials, circumventing McAleenan, three officials said.

So what DHS had been doing in general was working to make Trump's campaign tweet look like some kind of reality (AP reports that there really was a plan getting underway, but obviously not a plan the president was supposed to unveil to the world; Aaron Rupar said at Vox that the agency was blindsided by the Monday tweet and certainly wasn't prepared to go after the "millions" Trump mentioned in any case) and a flashy public impression that he was working on the issue so dear to his base, and what Morgan had been doing on the radio in particular was lying to the public on behalf of the emperor's preferred approach, which was going to be a pretty horrible affair, picking up people at random (the "collateral arrests" would get sent away with ankle monitors), snatching some parents while their children were unattended at home, and housing detainees in hotel rooms while processing them for fast-track deportation.

'We Have No Choice'

Morgan told NPR, and Trumpy was all excited this morning

but by afternoon it had suddenly turned out to be another non-emergency anyhow, called off at the last minute like that Iran raid:

At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) 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!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2019

I'm not sorry to hear it (Politico ties it to a reason raised by the publicity, "some ICE officers pushed back because of officer safety concerns and child welfare concerns"; Update 23 June: It's now understood he was responding to a Friday-night appeal from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, though that makes it odder still that he posted those Saturday-morning tweets).

But it's getting increasingly clear to everybody how crazy this government is, with the 300-pound guy on the bed reacting to the TV and the departments tearing out their hair to find out if there's some legal way of making him (and Fox News) think he's getting something he wants; and however glad we may be to see him dropping these dreadful plans the whole process is stomach-turning. It's worse for ordinary Iranian citizens or for our own 11 million undocumented who may have spent the week trying to settle their affairs as if the doctor had just told them they'd be dead in a week, but it's not good for the rest of us either. Even when it comes out all right (and there's no reason to think this thing is over—if Trump thinks Pelosi is going to snap into some kind of accommodation on immigration that will make him feel good, he's more delusional than I want to give him credit for) it's no way to live.

You might feel a bit soothed if you make a donation to RAICES or to the ACLU, which are doing heroic work on these matters.