The Trump administration almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week on immigration. Just as self-deportation is gaining steam, the White House briefly gave in to corporate pressure and announced that whole sections of the economy would be exempt from immigration enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cancelled that order Monday, but the incident is an important reminder that eternal vigilance is the price of immigration control.

Any successful strategy to cut the illegal population significantly will have to combine two things: ICE arresting and removing illegal aliens, and other illegal aliens leaving on their own. During the Eisenhower administration’s deportation push, it’s estimated that for every illegal alien apprehended and removed by Border Patrol, 10 others left on their own. That 10-to-one ratio is unlikely to hold this time — if only because all of the illegal immigrants back then were Mexicans within a few hundred miles of the Mexican border — but the multiplier effect is still real.

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To this end, Department of Homeland Security has launched a series of initiatives to send a clear message to illegal immigrants: Go home now before you are arrested and removed.

The department launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign telling prospective illegal immigrants not to come and current ones to leave.

Longstanding federal law that requires all foreigners in the country to be registered with the federal government is now being enforced. (Legal visitors are registered when they arrive.)

The CBP One cell phone app, which the Biden administration used to let hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens into the country illegally, has been rebranded CBP Home, which illegal aliens can use to facilitate their return.

To sweeten the pot, DHS is offering free flights home, plus a $1,000 bonus, for those who self-deport.

And it seems to be working: Preliminary data suggest nearly 1 million illegal aliens have departed the country since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. There’s also been plenty of reporting about individual illegal immigrants returning home to Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, China, Portugal, and elsewhere. Even the United Nations is helping with the “remigration” of illegal immigrants back to where they came from.

But powerful cheap-labor business interests, upset that the illegal population was actually dropping, got to the president and persuaded him to exempt whole industries from immigration enforcement. In a Truth Social post last week, the president complained that “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

While the president often riffs on issues without committing one way or the other, this seemed to be more than just thinking out loud. On the same day as Trump’s social media post, a senior ICE official sent an email instructing agents, “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

What’s more, the directive said that while investigations involving trafficking and the like are still permitted, non-criminal illegal aliens encountered in the course of such actions are to be let go — a prohibition on so-called “collateral” arrests. This was exactly the policy imposed on ICE by Alejandro Mayorkas, former President Joe Biden’s impeached DHS secretary.

This sparked fierce opposition both from the president’s base and within the administration itself. The policy would have amounted to an administrative amnesty for an estimated 2 million illegal workers, and as many or more family members.

It would have made the goal of deporting 1 million illegal aliens a year — the “mass deportation” benchmark the administration has set for itself — impossible to meet, or even approach.

More importantly, it would have fatally undermined the self-deportation strategy. After all, most illegal aliens aren’t rapists or murderers, and if you’re one of the many nonviolent illegal aliens working in the exempted industries, why would you feel the need to go home? If, just like under Biden, ICE isn’t coming for you, you might as well stick around.

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And the illegal immigrants in other industries — such as construction, landscaping, office cleaning, etc. — would have made the same calculation, figuring that their employers’ lobbyists would also complain to the White House and demand the same deal.

The short-lived restriction on ICE is lifted, but the longer-term issue remains. To adapt a favorite saying of former President Ronald Reagan, border control is never more than one memo away from extinction. The axis of open borders — leftists, libertarians, and big business — is tireless in its opposition to tight borders and limited immigration. The supporters of immigration control need to sleep with one eye open.

Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.