Plans by the Trump Administration to begin the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, which the president-elect’s Border Czar says will likely lead to collateral arrests inside immigrant communities, are part of a “shock and awe” campaign to “instill panic” in those communities, according to immigration advocates.

Incoming Border Czar Tom Homan, who served as acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump White House, said Sunday he would prefer to arrest “criminal alien(s)” when they are found in local jails or state prisons, but that isn’t always possible.

“We would love to work in local jails, but sanctuary cities won’t allow us into those jails. It’s much easier to arrest a public safety threat in the safety and security of a public jail than out in the street, because the officer is safer that way, the alien’s safer that way, the community is safer that way,” he told CBS.

Because ICE agents are prevented from interacting with local law enforcement in some states and according to some city ordinances, Homan said that those arrests that could occur at a jail will instead have to occur in immigrant communities, and that as a consequence people encountered along with an illegal immigrant could themselves face questions about their legal status.

“Here’s what’s going to happen: when we go to the community and find that person, find that criminal alien, it’s probably going to be with others. Others we’ll have to arrest,” he said.

ICE agents will be focusing on immigrants deemed to be “public safety threats and national security threats” and the agency knows “exactly where they’re probably likely to find them,” Homan said, but “other people that are there that may be illegal” encountered by agents will be handled on a “case-by-case basis.”

Having to go that route, Homan said, is “not safe for the community, not safe for the officers, not safe for anybody” and so he’s “pleading with sanctuary cities, let us in the jail to arrest the bad guy. That way you’re not forcing in the community.”

“Let us arrest a bad guy in the jail cell where you chose to arrest somebody and put him in the jail cell because obviously he’s a public safety threat,” he said.

The arrests will begin, Homan said, on “day one” of Trump’s second term.

Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, said that Homan’s comments demonstrate something “we know” already about the incoming administration.

“Tom Homan, along with Stephen Miller and President Trump himself, are seeking ‘shock and awe’ and to instill panic in immigrant communities,” she told the Herald.

Trump’s plan to begin deporting tens of millions of people on the first day of his new administration will not be well received by the broader U.S. population, Cárdenas said.

“Let’s be clear that Americans won’t take it kindly to seeing their neighbors detained, families broken up, and Dreamers deported,” she said.

That’s because the plan to send ICE into immigrant communities doesn’t just raise moral concerns, according to Cárdenas, but also raises economic questions. While a mass deportation program would cost billions on its own, she said, “the stubborn truth is that immigrants are fundamental to key sectors in our economy.”

“Deportations at the level Homan is describing would require billions in funding while harming all Americans, not just immigrants. And mass deportations won’t do a single thing to make America safer. Yes, we need to maintain a secure and orderly border and deport real public safety threats, but ensnaring longtime workers and long-settled community members in a mass deportation effort would harm all Americans,” she said.

According to estimates provided by the American Immigration Council, the cost of deporting the about 13 million immigrants thought to be living without lawful presence in the U.S. could cost anywhere from $315 billion if attempted in a single year or “$967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade,” if such an operation is even logistically possible.

A report released by the group in October said that “there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible, and that a ten year operation would “require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists.”

“To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people,” the report reads, in part.

According to Homan, as it currently operates, the U.S. border is “the biggest national security vulnerability we’ve seen in this nation.”

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