Last week the president, intensely lobbied by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, announced that whole sectors of the economy would be off-limits to ICE enforcement, including farming, meatpacking, hotels, and restaurants. And it wasn’t just idle musing by the president; a senior ICE official sent a directive out to all regional managers Thursday, prohibiting even collateral arrests of non-violent illegals in those industries during any operations focused on trafficking and the like.

As you can imagine, officials inside the administration who prioritized the president’s agenda rather than industry concerns were outraged. As a result, the president started walking this back on Sunday night, posting on Truth Social that ICE agents should “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History” and saying that enforcement should be intensified in sanctuary jurisdictions.

The matter was brought to a close Monday, as ICE announced that last week’s guidance to stop immigration enforcement was reversed, with a DHS spokeswoman confirming, “Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.”

Unlike the tariff issue, where the shifting messages probably really were a negotiating ploy, at least in part, the president’s caving, then uncaving, on immigration enforcement was not in service of any strategy. Rather it was a function of the president’s own conflicting impulses — he really does believe in controlling immigration (unlike many of his predecessors, for whom it was just boob bait for Bubba), but he also has the instincts and worldview of a businessman who wants easy access to labor. This makes him receptive to voices calling for enforcement only against illegal-alien criminals, leaving the vast majority of the illegal population unmolested, in what would amount to a continuation of the administrative amnesty of the Obama and Biden years.

The president was ill-served by Ag Lobbyist-in-Chief Secretary Rollins — if he had stuck with her recommendation, the damage to his agenda and his credibility would have been hard to exaggerate. He was saved by his hawkish immigration subordinates — this time. Will they succeed next time this happens?