Newly elected Sen. Ruben Gallego said Thursday said he is prepared to support the deportation of “a certain type of illegal immigrants,” a category he did not define.

But Gallego, who is being sworn in Friday morning, said it’s premature for him to talk about what actions, if any, he will take to combat any proposal by incoming President Donald Trump for “mass deportations.”

“We actually haven’t heard any plans,” he said in a Zoom press conference.

Gallego may not have to wait long.

In a speech last month in Phoenix, Trump vowed to issue “a historic slate of executive orders” on his first day in office, Jan. 20, to close the border to those trying to cross illegally “and stop the invasion of our country.” That, however, is just part of it.

“And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower,” the president-elect said of the 1954 action. That action, according to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service resulted in the mass deportation of about 1.1 million Mexican nationals, though some estimates say that figure is inflated.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics put the number of “unauthorized” in this country at about 11 million in 2022. The private Center for Immigration Studies, which has advocated for lower immigration numbers, puts the current figure of those not here legally at about 13.8 million.

Gallego said he and other Democrats are adopting a wait-and-see stance on what the new president proposes.

“We’re not going to just automatically knee-jerk and reject anything that comes from the White House,” he said. “We’re not going to run to the barricades when they use words like ‘mass deportations’ because even now, to this day, they have not really qualified what their plans are.”

In his press conference, Gallego also said that he does not see recent events, including the terrorist attack in New Orleans and the explosion in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, as a reason to rush through Trump’s choices for various security positions in the Cabinet.

“In light of what we saw yesterday we want to make sure we have the right national security nominees,” Gallego said.

“So just putting somebody in place doesn’t mean you’re actually going to have the type of collaboration and intelligence sharing that you need,” he continued. “We have to make sure the people who are ahead of this are able to actually manage these very important challenges.”

And Gallego said he wishes Republican Kari Lake luck if his general election foe ends up, as Trump has proposed, as the next director of the Voice of America, the government funded international broadcasting site.

“Look, she’s got great experience in the media,” Gallego said, referring to her time as co-host of the news on a commercial Phoenix TV outlet. But that endorsement of sorts came with a caveat.

“I hope she has learned that misinformation is not appreciated by Americans,” he said, a reference to various claims during the 2024 campaign, including that she actually won the 2022 race for governor despite being outpolled by Democrat Katie Hobbs. “I hope that she will take that lesson and effectively be director of Voice of America because I think Voice of America is a very important group and apparatus of the government to really spread the good news of America.”

But it is Gallego’s views on border security and deportation that could prove the most significant for the new senator who throughout the campaign had to battle charges by Lake that he supported “open borders.”

“What I focus on, and what I talked about on the campaign trail, and what Arizonans talked to me about is they want more border security, they want more customs and police officers, they want, where necessary, border walls,” he said. “And, yeah, they want a certain type of illegal immigrants deported.”

What Gallego said he did not hear his constituents calling for were things like family separations and jailing children.

“So what I’m going to do is actively work with Democrats and Republicans and this White House to fulfill that demand,” he said.

What has to happen next, said Gallego, is wait for the Trump administration to provide details of what it wants and “see if we can work together to fulfill what Arizonans ask of me to do.”

But the new senator said there are limits to his cooperation.

“When we feel that it’s actually bringing less security to Arizonans, then we’ll find ourselves at a loggerhead,” Gallego said. But he said this has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

“That does not mean that’s going to always stop us from trying to work together,” the senator said.

Gallego will have little choice but to work with Republicans, and not just on this issue.

Democrats got control of the Senate after the 2020 election, albeit with having Vice President Kamala Harris able to cast the deciding vote. The 2024 race in which Trump was elected saw Republicans take control of the chamber with 53 votes.

Gallego on Thursday noted the historic nature of his election: He is the first Latino ever to be elected to the Senate from Arizona.

“(There are) the thousands and thousands of Arizonans and the families that will see someone like me for the first time representing them,” he said. “I will make all of Arizona proud.”

While Gallego defeated Lake by more than 80,000 votes, that victory cost a lot of money.

The last campaign finance reports showed that Gallego spent more than $65 million to win the race. That doesn’t count money spent on his behalf, including more than $10 million by Protect Progress, which spends money on behalf of Democratic candidates who support cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

And WinSenate PAC, which is affiliated with then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spent another $1.5 million on commercials supporting Gallego, plus another nearly $18.6 million in anti-Lake ads.

All that compares with $25.1 million in campaign expenditures reported by Lake. And her outside help was much more limited, led by Win It Back PAC which supports conservative Republicans. It ran $15.2 million in anti-Gallego ads.