“Changes are coming” in how ICE looks to deport illegal immigrants, President Donald Trump vowed Thursday, indicating ICE would renew its focus on violent criminals — a shift that certainly makes sense to us.

This is an implicit slapdown of top Trump aide Stephen Miller, who recently thundered that ICE should be deporting 3,000 a day.

That’s a quota it can’t possibly meet without doing mass arrests — since tracking down the serious criminals is resource-intensive, but the agency’s budget is still stuck at Biden-era levels until the “big, beautiful bill” becomes law.

In a Truth Social post and later remarks to the press, the prez made it plain he doesn’t want a major effort to deport those who’ve been here illegally for a decade or more.

“Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business” say “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them,” Trump acknowledged, even people who’ve “worked for them for 20 years.”

“We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense,” the prez concluded. Right.

By some estimates, more than 3 million illegal immigrants have criminal records.

That’s enough to be getting on with.

But they’re going to have to figure out some effective approach to the 10 million or so that the Biden crew simply waved in since 2020: That issue moved legal immigrants decisively toward Trump in the last election — in a most unwelcome surprise to open-borders Democrats.

It makes perfect sense: People who went through the trouble of waiting their turn to come here legally, under established rules for eventually becoming US citizens, are furious that millions of others just cut the line, skipping the bureaucratic hassles and are now taking their jobs.

Not to mention the crime, costs and social problems tied to their arrival — or the way the left postures about the border-jumpers somehow deserving their own privileged “path to citizenship.”

As CNN data analyst Harry Enten marveled the other day: Immigrant citizens “have gone tremendously to the right on this issue in 2024 and 2025 versus where they were in 2020.”

In 2020, foreign-born citizens felt “closer to” Democrats on immigration than to Republicans by a 32-point margin; by 2025, Republicans led by eight points — a 40-point shift to the right.

Again, it’s a rational response to President Joe Biden waving in all those millions.

Meanwhile, the working-class voters that Dems used to care about are hardest hit by the consequences: crime, overburdened local schools, added competition for jobs, etc.

Which is why a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted June 4-6 found 54% of Americans backing Trump’s deportations, with just 46% opposed.

You may have seen the footage of two Brooklyn anti-ICE protesters smirking at a woman who just wants them to let her go to work: That’s emblematic of just how removed the left has grown from regular Americans’ concerns.

Yet Trump plainly now sees how the wrong approach to deportations could also infuriate average citizens, hence his promise to “use a lot of common sense.”

The contradictions won’t be easy to reconcile, but here’s how the prez could start: Make a show of attending a ceremonial swearing-in of a few dozen new citizens, sir — highlight the folks who’ve done everything right.