Whether he knew this or not, he is partly responsible for the fact that it is happening. Either he was absurdly negligent and didn’t notice that this was one of the major promises of the Trump campaign, or he did know and wants some plausible deniability to say “Oh, sure, I voted for Trump and convinced millions of others to do so as well, but I’m still a basically decent human being who doesn’t like seeing jackbooted thugs violently hauling people away into vans! I wanted this to happen in a nice and not terrifying way!”
Neither says anything good about him.
Until money is removed from politics, it is not just a bad idea, but physically dangerous to your person to assume that any politician is telling the truth without deep knowledge about that politician’s backers and history.