Well, folks, we had ourselves quite a Wednesday. Somebody inside ICE sent out verbal guidance telling certain field offices to stop arresting illegal aliens who didn't have criminal histories. Just arrests on immigration charges alone? Hold off, they said. And within hours, after the phones in Washington started ringing off the hook, that guidance got rescinded faster than you can say "who authorized this?"

You can read the full report here, but let me tell you what I keep coming back to. The part that ought to make every one of us sit up straight is the word "verbal." Nothing in writing. Nothing anybody can point to. Just a phone call or a meeting, and suddenly the fine men and women who enforce our immigration laws are being told to look the other way.

Now, I taught fourth grade for 34 years, and I'll tell you what I told every child who ever tried that trick: if you can't put your name on it, you shouldn't be saying it. Verbal guidance is how people in charge test the waters without leaving fingerprints. Somebody floats an order, sees who complains, and if nobody hollers, it becomes policy by Friday.

Plenty of folks hollered, thank the Lord. Voices on the right lit up immediately, and one of them said flat out that if this had actually become policy, he'd have called for impeachment. Friends, that man isn't being overheated. He understands that immigration enforcement is the whole reason the voters showed up in the first place. You don't get to promise deportations and then quietly tell your agents to ease off.

Let's be clear about what "no criminal history" means, because the media loves to dress it up in soft language. It means an illegal alien who hasn't been caught yet. Being in this country illegally is itself the offense we're talking about. Every single one of them broke the law to get here or to stay here, and the idea that we should only remove the ones who add a second crime on top of the first is nonsense. That's like saying the bank robber who didn't also speed on the way home gets a pass.

I'll give the administration credit for one thing: they fixed it fast. The guidance was pulled back the same day, and I'm glad. Dale always tells me the operational side of these things, and he says confusion at the field office level is poison, because agents stop knowing what they're allowed to do and start doing nothing at all. Rescinding it quickly was the right call.

But we deserve to know who sent that guidance and why. Some nameless somebody made a decision that would have let millions of illegal aliens off the hook, and so far the explanation is a shrug. A shrug is not an answer. We need sunlight on this, folks, the same as always.

To the ICE agents out there who kept doing their jobs while the suits upstairs sorted out their mixed signals: we see you, we thank you, and don't you dare let a bad phone call slow you down. And to whoever floated that trial balloon, next time have the courage to put it in writing so we know exactly who to hold accountable.

Alright, that's my two cents and I'm sticking to it. Y'all take care now.